The State Government on Tuesday announced to develop a chain of model schools on the line of Kendriya Vidyalay to provide quality education across the districts.
“One High School in each block headquarters will be upgraded with all modern educational facilities. The proposed model High Schools will be named as Satyabadi Model High School,” said Minister for School and Mass Education Rabinarayan Nanda.
Announcing this in the Assembly during his reply to the discussion on demand for grants of the School and Mass Education Department, Nanda said each model school will have requisite number of teachers.
Plans are afoot to provide periodic training to the teachers of the proposed model schools to update them with the changing curriculum.
Special coaching classes will held for the students to clear their doubts and emphasis will be given on Science, Mathematics, English and Computer Education, he said.It has been decided to provide one-time assistance of Rs 25 lakh for infrastructure development and Rs 15 lakh for quality improvement of each model school.
Responding to the demands of members for regularisation of services of block grant teachers and non-teaching staff of block grant schools, the Minister said a new grant-in-aid policy will be announced soon and the Government has decided to pay higher salary as per the recommendation of the Sixth Pay commission.
“All the private schools, which will be eligible till March 31, 2013, will be considered for grant-in-aid under the new policy,” the Minister said.
The State Government has given its share of Rs 42.95 crore in the budget for setting up Model Schools in tribal dominated districts and ` 1.20 crore has been allocated for a BEd training college in Kandhamal district.Admitting that the State has huge shortage of trained teachers both at primary and secondary level, Nanda said steps are being taken to increase the number of seats in the teachers’ training institutes from 3,150 to 6,300 for primary teachers and from 1,140 to 2,000 for secondary teachers. The Government has sought the approval of the National Council for Teachers Education (NCTE) in this regard.
Initiating the discussion, Prafulla Majhi of Congress said State is unable to achieve the target of universialisation of primary and secondary education primarily because of shortage of teachers.Members cutting across party lines demanded vacant teacher posts to be filled up with appointment of regular teachers and regularisation of services of contractual and ad-hoc teachers.