BHUBANESWAR: Students of Unit-IX government girls’ high school and their parents hit the streets and locked the school gate on Monday protesting the School and Mass Education department’s decision to merge it with the government boys’ high school nearby.
Meanwhile, some of the students fell unconscious during the demonstration. The agitating girls said they had refused to shift to any other campus in the past and this time too, they will not shift to the boys’ school.
The school was established in 1967. Two years back, the department informed that Classes VI to X of the school would be merged with the boys’ school to make space for the Rama Devi higher secondary school (HSS), previously called Rama Devi junior college.
By shifting the infrastructure of the HSS to the girls’ high school, it will be bifurcated from the Rama Devi Women’s University. Separating the higher secondary school from the university has become the need of the hour as classes for nearly 2,500 students of HSS are being held just for three hours in the morning due to inadequate classrooms in the university.
“This is a very old school and girls from different parts of the city come here to study. We have no objection to shifting the Rama Devi higher secondary school to this campus but why to shift our girls to a boys’ school for that?,” questioned Prafulla Nayak, a guardian.
The girls’ school located adjacent to the university has nearly 400 students and was transformed in the first phase of the 5T High School Transformation programme. Congress leader Suresh Routray also joined the protest and demanded that the girl students should not be shifted from their campus. The agitating students were pacified after block education officer Pragyan Jena assured them to take up their demand with the higher authorities.