Norms rehashed to ensure children’s education

BHUBANESWAR: The State Government has revised the guidelines on roles and responsibilities of Cluster Resource Centre Coordinators (CRCCs) - the grass root level teacher educators - to increase enrolment, improve quality of education and provide an alternative to school monitoring system. 

An official communique issued by the Odisha Primary Education Programme Authority (OPEPA) states that all CRCCs are required to visit schools in their cluster at least once a month and stay there till lunch break and take stock of academic activities and suggest measures for improving the academic structure. 

The CRCCs will ensure that rights of children are protected and children of school going age are enrolled in nearby schools. As per the revised guidelines, the CRCCs need to take steps for age appropriate admission of children of all school going age who have not enrolled and make provision for special training of them either in residential or non-residential set up.”  It further states that the CRCCs will be responsible for ensuring that school development plan (SDP) of every school is readied within the given time line with focus on development of student learning process, capacity building of teachers and improvement of learning environment in schools. 

The communique added that apart from State-level workshops, CRCCs will be required to organise need-based cluster level capacity building workshops on various issues as needed. Besides, the teacher educators have been assigned responsibility of ensuring implementation of schemes such as MDM, Surabhi, Swachhata Saptah among others. They will have to upload all required data of their cluster in the newly developed school monitoring apps. Moreover, the CRCCs have been asked to inspect sanitation, drinking water and other facilities and arrangements in schools under their clusters and report it to appropriate authorities. 

OPEPA State Project Director Bhupendra Singh Poonia said CRCCs will also organise community level activities and motivate community members, school alumni and other donors for strengthening of ‘Mo School’ programme.