Andhra Pradesh private schools miffed over fee arrears

Vijayawada: Managements of more than 15,000 private schools are unhappy with the state government for failing to address the issue of the clearance of arrears of last term’s fee worth crores of rupees from students, even though it issued an order reducing tuition fees by 30 per cent for the current academic year.

They say that since Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a nation-wide call to observe the ‘janata curfew’ to curb the spread of Covid-19 on March 22, all schools have remained closed and in due course of time, students from Classes I to X were promoted to the next class without conducting annual exams.

They say that during every academic year, they complete the syllabus early and take up revision during March to enable students to appear for the annual exams scheduled to be held in April-May. They wonder how they can forgo their fee arrears for the last term of the academic year as it involves many working months.

Referring to the AP High Court’s recent judgment, they maintain that even the court permitted them to collect the fee arrears of last academic year from the students.

There are nearly one crore students in Classes I to X in the state. Of them, 55 lakh are enrolled in government schools while the rest are in private schools. The government spends `40,000 to `60,000 on each student per academic year in government schools, providing infrastructure and recruiting teachers to teach the students.

Private schools say that though they are saving huge amounts of money to the state government as nearly 45 lakh students are enrolled in their schools, they get no support from the state government.

They are critical of the government for failing to impose curbs on the spending of financial assistance of `15,000 given to each student under the Amma Vadi scheme as the amount is misused by the parents, majority of whom are not using that money to pay school fees, causing further financial strain on private schools.

The state government's recent decision removing the need for the submission of a transfer certificate to take admission in a new school up to Class VIII also drew criticism from private schools as they say that some students have enrolled in new schools without clearing financial dues.

Moreover, the state’s decision empowering deputy district education officers and mandal education officers to delete the names of students from the state government’s web portal ‘Child Info’ enables them to enrol in new schools without taking a transfer certificate or clearing dues. This has caused immense trouble to private schools.

Private school managements say that they have huge overheads to attend to like paying rentals for school buildings, wages to teaching and non-teaching staff, whether in part or full, meeting operational costs, irrespective of whether or not they are running the schools. They wonder from where they are meant to meet such expenditure if the students are allowed to go free without clearing fee dues to the schools.

They have appealed to the state government to come to their rescue by fixing the fee structure in private schools based on certain parameters like infrastructure, quality of faculty and others and allow them to function, as they are providing education to the students, mainly from low and middle income families, and also providing employment to professionally qualified teachers.

AP Private Schools Managements Association president K. Chandra Sekhar, said “We want the state government to address our issues related to the collection of fee dues, restore the old practice of the submission of a transfer certificate to change school and fix fee structures so that we will contribute our share for promotion of education in the state.”