Hyderabad: Private schools now want the government to pay salaries to teachers

Hyderabad: Left with no option to collect dues as the Director of SSC Board allowed students to download hall-tickets directly from the official website, the budget school managements are knocking on the doors of government to ease the burden of paying salaries to teachers.In a letter to the government, the Telangana Recognised School Managements Association (TRSMA) urged the authorities to bear the burden of salaries of their staff, as Covid lockdown has caused a massive financial burden on budget schools.

"The school managements are being constantly harassed by the education department for payment of salaries to the staff during the lockdown. Add to it, the Director of SSC Board has allowed the students to download their hall tickets directly from the website without any compulsion to approach headmasters for signature for getting the same," said the letter.The managements, it further said, used to hold the hall-tickets in order to realise the fee dues from the parents.

Once the hall-tickets were released to the students, it is not possible to make parents repay the dues, said Y Shekhar Rao, president of Telangana Recognised School Managements Association (TRMS).Students, he added, studying in these budget schools are from low and lower middle class families. Parents usually are not prompt in paying fees of their wards and 50 to 60 per cent of them pay only before the exams. As this year, the COVID-19 lockdown made it impossible to conduct the SA-II (Summative Assessment ) and the government declared the students promoted without SA II for classes I to IX, the fee collection further reduced to less than 50 per cent.

"It would also be difficult for us to demand fee dues post Covid period. The loss of fee dues to the tune of more than 50% along with the dues from the students who appeared for SSC 2020 (some have several years of fee dues) has put us in severe financial crisis," rued S Madhusudhan, General Secretary, TRMS. "In such a scenario we urge the Chief Minister to make arrangement for payment of salaries to the teachers of budget schools in order to ameliorate the situation," said Shekhar Rao.