STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVING SCHOOL COMMUNITY RELATIONSHIP FOR EFFECTIVE MANAGEMENT OF SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN ENUGU STATE, NIGERIA.

Abstract

The study is on strategies for improving school community relationship for effective management of secondary schools in Enugu state. Two research questions and two hypotheses was formulated for the study respectively. Descriptive survey research design was employed for the study. The population for the study consists of 314 principals and 6921 secondary school teachers that gave a total of 7235, while the sample for the study included a total of 722 respondents consisted of 31 principals and 691 teachers. Questionnaire was designed to elicit appropriate information from the respondents. The instrument was faced validated by three experts, two from educational management department and one in measurement and evaluation department all from faculty of education in Enugu State University of Science and Technology. The reliability co-efficient of the instrument was calculated using Cronbanch Alpha method. Alpha value was found to be 0.93 indicating high reliability of the instrument. Mean score and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions, and t-test statistic was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study indicated that there is great extent to which community participates in financial management be used as a strategy to improve school-community relationship for effective management of secondary schools in Enugu state. Based on this, it was recommended that community should be organized through the different organs to assist the schools and take active parts in some school administrative activities where they have been found to be very useful like pupilpersonnel and finance management.