Haryana school mergers will close all girls-only schools in state: Teachers

NEW DELHI: The Government Girls Middle School, Rori, in Sirsa district of Haryana, has 10 teachers for over 200 students. With the latest teacher transfer drive, announced in August, Haryana Government has now put all 10 teachers on the transfer list. The girls’ school is being “merged” with the nearby Government Senior Secondary School which has 17 teachers for around 800 students.

“The senior secondary school itself has 34 sanctioned teaching posts and half of those are vacant. The same staff will now have to come and teach over 200 more students at GGMS. It looks like only merging is happening. But if there is no staff then parents will stop sending the students to the schools. That means the enrollment will come down eventually and when that happens, the government will close it down saying there aren’t enough students,” Vakil Singh, a social activist based in Rori.

“The various educational policies and surveys done in Haryana over the years which looked at girls enrollment had found that, considering the social circumstances, there should be girls-only schools to encourage parents to send girls to study. Because of this, under various governments, girls' middle schools were opened,” said Bitu Singh, one of the teachers at GGMS Rori.

A good example of a girls’ middle school being set up in response to the community’s request is GGMS Rori itself. After being elected chief minister in 1999, Indian National Lok Dal’s Om Prakash Chautala visited Rori and was flooded with requests from villagers to set up a girls-only school. The minister agreed on the terms that the villagers provide the land. A year later, GGMS Rori came up in October 2000 on panchayat land.

But with the schools being forced to close down, teachers believe that the trends will reverse.

“Now, more and more girl students will drop out. Even now there are issues in our society. No matter how much the intellectuals say that education should be co-educational, there is a practical need for girls-only schools in Haryana,” said Singh.

Teachers claimed that as a part of the exercise, the Haryana education department has also declared teaching posts “surplus” even in schools where there are enough students to teach. Posts for subject teachers have fared especially poorly and many have been abolished creating “huge imbalances” and forcing teachers to additionally teach subjects other than their own. Some teachers have even alleged that this has caused primary school teachers (for Classes 1 to 5) without the appropriate qualifications to teach secondary classes, Classes 9 and 10, to tide over shortage.

Haryana Schools: ‘close schools, abolish posts’

Earlier this month, the Haryana Government announced that schools with low enrolment in the state will be merged and that teachers who have spent more than five years in one school or zone will be enrolled for transfer from August 24.

The BJP-led state government identified 105 schools for “rationalisation”. Rationalisation is the process in which schools are merged together and teaching and other resources redistributed, ostensibly to allow for more efficient use of resources.

Haryana schools: Villagers protesting against the governmetn infront of a girls-only school in Jind.

However, teachers claimed that this rationalisation process is an excuse. They believe the final objective is to close schools and abolish teaching posts.

“During our meeting with the education minister of Haryana, we showed him the list of schools which were being merged despite having enough students and teachers but the education minister said that they are planning to make it co-educational,” said Dharmenda Dhandha, president of Haryana Vidyalaya Adhyapak Sangh (HVAS). Haryana’s education minister is the BJP’s Kanwar Pall Gujjar.

Haryana Education: Girls’ schools

Teachers said that the merger process will effectively close down all girls-only schools in the state.

According to data gathered by the Haryana Vidyalaya Adhyapak Sangh, in the border district of Sirsa alone, 11 schools with more than 50 students each were merged with other schools within three kilometres. Of these Sirsa schools, 10 were girls-only, teachers said. Two of these schools – the Rori school and Government Middle School, Jagmalera – had over 200 students each but were still listed to be merged.

“All the girls' schools are being closed. They will now be shifted to a co-education school by moving them to another boys school. All the primary and upper primary girls-only schools in Haryana will be merged with boys schools,” said Jagrosan, former president of Haryana Vidyalaya Adhyapak Sangh. “Even in cases where there are more than 160 girl students in a school, they are being shifted to a school with 120 boys. Now we can essentially say that all the primary and upper primary girls-only schools are now closed.”

In all these schools, the teachers were put on the transfer list and the burden of teaching was shifted to teachers in the nearby schools into which they were merged.

In villages across Haryana, teachers, students and villagers protested in front of the girls-only schools demanding the rationalisation policy be withdrawn. In GGMS Rori alone, more than 200 villagers were present in front of the school.

What about ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’?

Teachers said that the girls-only schools in the state were created in response to demand from villages over decades and that additional teaching posts were not sanctioned to these schools.

“The government is saying Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao but where will they study? These girls-only schools were created so that parents could send their children to girls-only schools,” said Jagrosan.

“Parents will have a problem. Some of them want girl students to study separately. It was based on the people’s demand that the girls-only schools were constructed over the years under various chief ministers,” said Dhandha.

Educationists said that this move will adversely affect girl students as parents will be unwilling to send them if schools are located far from home. This would, in turn, encourage more dropouts.

Teacher Haryana: ‘A social issue’

Teachers said that, across Haryana, in the name of merging, schools that had adequate teachers and students were merged and their existing teaching posts were abolished. The government has argued that mergers will bring down pupil-teacher ratios – meaning, there will be fewer students per teacher – but the teachers have their doubts.

Haryana Schools: Villagers demonstrating against the new teacher transfer policy in Haryana

“I work in a Model Sanskriti School, Jakhar, where there are 33 teaching posts. If we look at the student ratio then 49 posts are needed there. Where there is already a shortage of 16 teachers, they assigned just 10 posts,” said Dhandha. “They are combining the schools. They call it ‘merging’, but will not give them separate teachers. Teachers will only be allotted to the school as one, no matter how many teachers they had separately,”

“In Haryana, it has become a social issue. Even the people are realising that the teachers are being transferred. People are not stupid, they understand what this means for their children’s education,” Jagrosan.

Haryana Education: Subject teachers

The transfers have wreaked havoc of their own. In a statement, the Haryana School Lecturer Association (HSLA) said that there are “umpteen examples” of teaching posts being declared surplus despite the schools having enough students. The group also alleged the government was abolishing posts in certain subjects and asking other subject teachers to cover for it.

“They are destroying specialisation by saying that one teacher will have to teach multiple subjects. The whole transfer policy is against students. In four-five years, no English teacher post was filled in Haryana,” said Jagrosan.

“In many districts, [the] post of lecturer in economics has been abolished in schools where commerce stream is being pursued which is absolutely inequitable as students of Class 12 will not be able to switch their subjects from economics to maths at this juncture,” said HSLA, in the statement.

Teachers also alleged they are forced to teach students in higher classes despite not being trained for it. With non-teaching staff also included in the rationalisation policy, the burden of non-teaching work has also increased. “The government is not filling these posts as well. They have no care for classrooms. No primary school in Haryana has any regular or part time sweepers. Teachers or headmasters have to figure this out somehow or they will have to do it themselves,” said Jagrosan.

Despite the protests, in a press conference on Thursday, Pal, the education minister, said that the government will move forward with the school rationalisation and teacher rationalisation policy. Also on Thursday, Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar announced that more than 11,000 teachers will be recruited in Haryana by the next academic session.