| WITH Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) ambitious proposal to introduce English medium schools getting the nod of the education committee, over 200 teachers are now required to be appointed for the project. Besides the required qualifications, only those who have prior experience of teaching in English medium schools will be appointed,” said BMC Education Committee Chairman Mangesh Satamkar. The project is likely to be implemented from academic session 2007-08 and its introduction will be done in a phased manner. Accordingly, English will be introduced in junior KG, senior KG and standard I in the first year and other standards will be included in the subsequent years. A budget of around Rs 44 crore have been allotted for the purpose. Three teachers will be appointed per school-one each for the three section–and a separate budgetary provision of Rs 1.55 crore has been proposed for recruitments by the BMC education committee. But, the process of recruiting teachers does not appear to be smooth and few within the BMC feel that a large number of qualified teachers may not be willing to shift from private English medium schools to municipal schools. “The salaries offered by private schools are much higher and BMC will have to keep that in mind if they want quality teachers for its English medium schools,” said an official on condition of anonymity. However, Additional Municipal Commissioner (Projects) Manu K Srivastava said that BMC is confident of getting good teachers because unlike private institutes, a BMC job provides stability of tenure. “Besides, we will finalise the salaries and the qualifications taking into consideration the current market scenario,” said Srivastava. BMC also insists that the project is not an attempt to compete with private schools and “shift teachers” but to ensure that students at municipal schools are not deprived of quality education. “This way parents will have the choice of sending their children to English or vernacular medium,” Satamkar said. “It will benefit those who want their children to study in English medium schools but are unable to afford the high fees charged by private schools,” he added. In addition to an independent advisory board that will be set up to supervise education, municipal schools are likely to tie up with the District Institute of Education and Training or DIET for training the newly-recruited teachers.URL: http://in.news.yahoo.com/061129/48/69uit.html |