Managements for anything but Safe Schools

Hyderabad: The ‘Safe School’ initiative by the state government has gone for a toss with the private school managements (PSMs) expressing their inability to comply with the statutory norms in ensuring safety to children in schools.This assumes significance in the wake of the tragic death of student N Shiv Rachit in a school sump at Malkajgiri in Hyderabad.

According to sources in the Directorate of School Education (DSE), the private schools made no bones about complying with the norms at a meeting of the PSMs, Hyderabad Schools Parents’ Association (HSPS) and other stakeholders.

The meeting was also attended by the State Information Technology Secretary Jayesh Ranjan. “It was proposed to carry out a thorough security audit in all the private schools in the twin cities and elsewhere in the State against the backdrop of the regulatory guidelines issued by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR),” he said.

Following the proposals parents, who attended the meeting, had urged the government to make them part of the exercise as they were also the stakeholders. The NCPCR guidelines give scope for the parents to be part of such mechanism. However, the PSMs had flatly rejected the proposal, besides opposing the ‘Safe School’ move of the DSE, bringing the entire exercise to a grinding halt. The PSMs claim that it would be impractical to implement the provisions of the regulatory guidelines.

This apart, if the government forces them they will have no other option but to shut down their institutions. Following the threat, the senior officials could not take their agenda forward. The guidelines had been issued against the backdrop of the Right to Education Act 2009, the National Early Childhood Care and Education Policy – 2013. Besides, the private schools should also comply with the provisions of the POCSO Act, 2012, Juvenile Justice Act, 2015, Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2016, he added.

The HSPS representative Ramanjit Singh said that they had requested making parents part of the move as most of the schools do not allow parents even to check the kind of food being served to their wards. “Just we had to pay whatever fee they demand and forget. Any inquiry into the ways that the schools are run is being viewed as interference in the management,” he pointed out.

Clarifying on the tug-of-war going on between the parents and the PSMs, the Private Schools Correspondents Association (PSCA), representative Mohammad Abdul Majeed Fateh said that around 20 per cent of “the big schools” might be in a position to comply with the regulatory guidelines. The remaining schools are mostly small ones running in the neighborhood localities which cannot afford to implement the norms,” he added.

The Hyderabad Regional Joint Director of School Education, S Vijayalakshmi said that the District Education Officers (DEOs) of the districts concerned should personally visit the schools and check compliance of the safety norms as per the Government Order No.1 issued in 1994 by the state government in the erstwhile undivided state of Andhra Pradesh.

She said that approval is given only on the basis of the inspection report and the No Objection Certificate (NOC) issued by the Road and Buildings department certifying the safety of the buildings where the applicants wish to run the school.

However, dismissing all this, Ramanjit Singh demanded the State government to make it mandatory for the private schools to print a statutory compliance statement in all the printed materials issued to the parents at the time of taking admissions, brochures, handouts, advertisements, and websites of the private schools. This will help in creating awareness among the parents and to take an informed decision on admitting their children to a school, he said. There are about 5,000 schools with a strength of around 12.5 lakh students in the twin cities, the sources said.