Kerala: Higher secondary teachers to protest

Thiruvananthapuram: Higher secondary teachers are set to protest against the decision to organise cluster meeting even as public examinations are going on. The meeting is scheduled for Friday as no public examinations are scheduled for the day. While the Kerala Higher Secondary Teachers Union (KHSTU) has announced that they will boycott the meeting, the higher secondary director M.S. Jaya warned that any teacher who stayed away will be considered as an unauthorised absentee. The meetings will be held in schools in which the teachers are employed.

Though the normal practice was to hold cluster meetings separately for primary, high school, and higher secondary teachers, this time it was a joint meeting of all teachers. Higher secondary teachers are the only ones opposing the meet. The decision was to conduct a joint meeting on March 24 to finalise modalities for their vacation training and discuss the implementation of the General Education Protection Mission (Pothuvidyabhyasa Samrakshana Yajnam) project aimed to make Kerala a fully digitalised state in education sector. O. Shoukkathali, KHSTU general secretary, said that the meeting was being held without settling issues of higher secondary education sector including sanction to appointments made in the sector. This was the reason for the boycott, Mr Shoukkathali said.

The department had sanctioned 1,739 junior and 89 senior higher secondary school teacher vacancies in aided sector and 564 junior teachers and 46 senior teachers in government sector in 249 new higher secondary schools and 190 extra batches that were sanctioned in higher secondary schools sanctioned in 2014-15. The general education department had forwarded a total of 2,725 including these posts for sanction to the finance department. These posts have not yet got the sanction of finance department.