Grant-in-aid Ahmedabad schools say no to govt teachers, refuse grants

In the stand-off between the government and the grant-in-aid schools, it will be the students who are likely to be the worst sufferers.

In a meeting held in Gandhinagar on Wednesday members of Gujarat State School Management Association (GSSMA) have asserted that from June 2012 they will refrain from accepting grants provided by the government to run these schools. This move is aimed to oppose the Gujarat government notification of selecting teachers for the grant-in-schools from June.

The notification issued on February 2011 states that the government will have the right of selecting teachers for such schools as it provides them grants to run these schools. However, as expected, this decision did not go down well with the school management as they wanted the right to appoint the teachers in their own schools.
The ongoing opposition by GSSMA, since then, has turned more aggressive now and the school management has decided that from June 2012 they will run the schools on their own. President of GSSMA, Naran Patel said, "We have decided that we will not take government grants and run the schools on our own. Students of classes X and XII will appear for exams from Gujarat Open School. The remaining classes will be run by us."
When asked, how the school management will afford teacher's payments, Patel said that retired teachers will be asked to teach the students.
This decision has multiple implications. First, students of such schools will be greatly affected as they will be now taught by teachers who have retired and are not part of active teaching. Secondly, hundreds of new teachers will be rendered jobless as the retired teachers will be appointed in such schools instead of them. This indicates that those teachers, who were happy to be appointed by the government to teach in these grant-in-aid schools, will now be jobless as these schools will not accept them as teachers.
Elaborating further about their opposition, Patel alleged that the government cannot have the right of appointing and selecting the teachers in return for providing them grants. "We run and manage the school and thus the right to appoint teachers should remain with us," Patel asserted.