9771 primary schools to merge with high schools in state

KAKINADA: At the start of the academic year, confusion exists over the plans for merger of schools and deployment of teachers in Andhra Pradesh.

As per the New Education Policy, primary schools would be merged with high schools in a radius of one km. But, it is not clear which school should be merged with which high school in different areas in the absence of clear instructions from the state government.

Parents are also confused over this. However, due to oral instructions from the Education Department, the DEOs got ready for the mapping of school mergers. Nearly 9,771 schools are to be merged with high schools.

On Tuesday, DEOs advised the headmasters of the listed primary schools to handover the records including enrolment registers to the respective high school headmasters.

Teachers union leaders argued that without taking permission of students, their enrollment records should not be transferred to other schools. The higher authorities ignored such objections.

These ‘leaders’ say they are worried over the NEP and merger of the schools. AP UTF leader Thotakura Chakravarthi said the teacher-pupil ratio will go up from the present 1:40 to 1:60 once the merger policy is implemented.

The mapping of merged schools is complete, but the government is yet to issue an instruction to the schools in writing. “According to NEP, the quality of education will suffer further, as fewer teachers will have to attend to more students. Further, for many subjects, there is no teacher in many schools. As the government claims a surplus of teachers, there may not be recruitments in the coming five or ten years,” he said.

“As per the new policy, a teacher has to teach 42 hours a week and this is too much. Till now, it was 24 hours per week for teaching and 24 hours for assignments, examination and evaluation process,” he noted.

He said that according to the government statistics, nearly six lakh students have been newly enrolled but the student-teacher ratio remained the same.

Teachers’ leaders while discussing with the authorities about merger of schools had proposed that students should not have to face a situation of crossing natural barriers like highways, canals, railway tracks, forest areas. But, now, in the mapping of the schools list, such schools have also been included.

“There is no clarity on the merging of schools and we got no instruction so far. There is no clarity on teachers’ deployment too,’’ said the Kakinada DEO, D Subhadra. She said there was a lack of clarity about the New Education Policy too.

However, she said, the government may give clear instructions soon.