KURNOOL: With schools set to reopen on August 16 after a long recess due to Covid, private school teachers are facing a tough time as every teacher has been asked to procure 15 students. Private teachers, who are already burdened with heavy academic workloads, feel that the extra assignment of finding students for enrolment is difficult.
“No one knows how long physical classes will run given the impending danger of new variations of Covid infection,” said Jinka Suryanarayana, a private school teacher. There are nearly 1,100 private schools and 130 private junior colleges in the district and at least 50,000 teaching staff are working across the district. As many as 3.50 lakh students enrolled for their studies in the above schools.
The school managements set a deadline to complete their targets by the month-end, a corporate school teacher Thimmayya, who is working in Kurnool city, said. He has been working as a maths master in the private sector for nine years, but due to Covid-19, his experience does not seem to come in handy to meet his enrolment targets.
Even old students were also not showing interest in renewal of their names due to the online classes system, he added. "At least 10 of my colleagues resigned from this sector including four teachers from only one corporate school branch which is now hardly functioning in the city as they failed to reach their targets recently," he said.
He, however, said he was on the safe side after he maintained a close relationship with parents, he said. Indira, a language teacher from a private school in Nandyal town, said with regular pressures and tortures, the teaching profession had become a nightmare for those working at private educational institutions.
L. Mary Jacob, a principal, working at the branch of a corporate school, said the teaching profession was not what it was earlier. “Now the meaning of a teacher has changed to begging parents to join their children in schools and not to impart quality education to students. Each principal has a fixed target of a minimum of 40 admissions while one teacher has a minimum of 10 admissions targets every year,” she added.
“In fact, now the duty of teachers is to find new admissions, renewals, fee collections, and attendance instead of providing quality teaching,” she said about the present situation in the private school sector.
When contacted, the district educational officer M. Sai Ram said the special teams had been monitoring private schools on such incidents. “If any management is found torturing the teachers on admissions or other issues like pending salaries, we will take departmental action against them,” he added.
