Don’t relieve teachers until they get new post: Education department

GURUGRAM: With protests gripping several districts over transfer of teachers, leaving many government schools with fewer or no educators at all, the Haryana secondary education department has asked its officials in districts not to relieve those identified for the second round of the transfer drive till they are allotted a new school.
In a notice issued to education officers of all the 22 districts, the department has said that no teacher identified for the second round of the transfer drive should be relieved until they have been allotted a new posting. Once the second round of transfer for regular teachers is completed, a similar mechanism will apply to the guest teachers.
“Consequent upon the issuance of the transfer orders, grievances are being received on the Sugam Sampark Portal. After examining all the complaints, the department will take a decision as per the transfer policy so that no teacher feels that injustice has been done in any case,” read the letter issued by the directorate of school education.
A senior education department official told TOI, “Many teachers have left their existing duty stations even before being allotted a new school, leaving many institutions with no or fewer teachers.”
“Furthermore, the issue has taken a political turn as people with vested interests are trying to spread unrest by peddling misnomers around the transfer drive and school rationalisation. For the second round, we want to avoid the conflicts that emerged during the first one,” he added.
Under the school rationalisation policy, the government seeks to merge schools that are within one to three kilometres and run them as one single unit. This, the department maintains, will help them improve the student-teacher ratio.
“In the initial phase, we will be merging around 105 middle and high schools that have an enrollment of fewer than 25 students. Going ahead, we’ll merge more schools. For instance, having two middle schools — one for boys and another for girls — in the same village makes no sense,” the official said.
“Similarly, many villages have a primary, middle, and a high school in the vicinity. We want to count these three different schools as one. This will give us more headspace to appoint teachers to standardise student-teacher ratio,” he added.
The teachers, however, refuted these arguments and said that the government was only trying to find a way out to justify their reluctance to not appoint new teachers.
Sushil Katariya of Haryana School Lecturers’ Association, said, “Three different schools in a village is a concept of the Right to Education (RTE) Act, where a primary school has to be within 1km and senior school within 3km. This has been so designed so that girls don’t have to travel much and drop out. The government is misguiding people.”