State higher secondary council readies plan for neighbouring institutions to share teaching staff

The state higher secondary council has finalised a plan for neighbouring institutions to share teaching staff to tide over the scarcity of teachers at the plus-II level.

Under this model, a school that does not have a subject-specific teacher will engage a teacher for the subject from another school nearby.

Many institutions are struggling to hold classes because of a shortage of teachers, council president Chiranjeeb Bhattacharya told The Telegraph last week.

He met the state education secretary, Manish Jain, on Wednesday to take up the issue of clustering of schools.

Bhattacharya said the department has given its consent to introducing the model.

“A large number of schools, many of them in the districts, are struggling to hold classes owing to a shortage of teachers. In this situation, we have no other option but to ask neighbouring institutions to share teachers to manage the scarcity. Although this is not an ideal solution, it is the only option available until new teachers are appointed,” the council president told this newspaper on Thursday.

A council official said hundreds of schoolteachers had retired but new teachers had not been appointed after 2016.

Ever since complaints of alleged irregularities in the recruitment of teachers based on a selection test held in 2016 surfaced, the state government has not held any recruitment exercise.

An already difficult situation has been made worse by the possibility of over 4,000 teachers, who had been allegedly recruited illegally, losing their jobs.

The high court had on April 22 cancelled the appointment of over 25,700 teachers and non-teaching employees at government-aided schools who had been recruited through the 2016 test.

The list contained 4,000-odd teachers at the plus-II level. The Supreme Court stayed the high court order last week and posted the matter for further hearing on July 16.

The scarcity of teachers has so intensified that the council could even ask students of a school to go to a nearby college to take lessons from subject-specific teachers, the council president said.

“We have to decide whether the council will offer an honorarium to the college teachers for their service. But we are thinking of all options so classes can be held. Or else many of the subjects would have to be eventually dropped,” he said.

One reason for the absence of teachers snowballing into a crisis is the council’s decision to start five more courses at the plus-II level over the past two years. The schools have not got any new teachers for the new courses, council officials said.

“We will soon decide how the clustering model will be run. Schools might be asked to approach the council with details about the absence of teachers,” Bhattacharya said.