Teachers’ body urges school education department to issue G.O. on school restructuring

Members of Navyandhra Teachers’ Association (NTA) insisted that the school re-structuring process should be taken up by the Department of School Education only after a formal Government Order (G.O.) is issued to replace the existing G.O. 117.

In a statement, association State president K. Harikrishna and general secretary M. Srinivasa Rao said the department only issued a memo and proposed major changes based on it.

They also pointed out that while schools in the State offered medium of instruction in Odia, Kannada, Tamil and Urdu, students were denied Telugu medium and demanded that the Minister for Human Resource Development Nara Lokesh call for a meeting with the teachers’ unions to discuss these key issues threadbare before taking a final call.

Referring to the controversial G.O. 117, they said it faced stiff opposition from teachers and other stakeholders. While reports appearing in a section of media claimed that the G.O. had been withdrawn and that the school education authorities had proposed to set up nine categories of schools, a G.O. to this effect was yet to be released.

They said there were reports that the officials proposed to do away with upper primary schools and warned that this would adversely impact education of girls and may encourage parents to opt for child marriage. They said teachers, especially in high schools, faced work overload in the absence of subject-wise faculty distribution and the size of classes was being expanded in violation of the Right to Education Act.

They said the memo also appears to ignore previous feedback given by various teachers associations.