CHENNAI: Following the announcement in the Tamil Nadu Assembly to extend the breakfast scheme to all primary schools in the state, the school education department has asked officials to appoint coordinators for the scheme for each educational district.
Block resource teacher educators have been asked to monitor the scheme. They will function under district education officers (elementary) who will oversee the programme at the district level. “All government officials in primary education, including headmasters and school teachers, will be involved to ensure the efficient functioning of the scheme. At present, the department has asked for details of the number of students in each school,” said a school education department official.
The Chief Minister’s Breakfast Scheme was expanded to cover all 30,122 government primary schools from the next academic year and `500 crore was allocated for it. It is expected to benefit 18 lakh students.
As per another budgetary announcement, the State Council of Educational Research and Training has said that state-level training will be conducted from May 18 to May 20 for extending the Ennum Ezhuthum scheme to cover classes 4 and 5. Following this, district-level training will be held from May 25 to May 27.
“While the hiccups in updating the assessment of students in the EMIS application have been solved, implementation of the scheme will be effective only when there is one teacher for each class. Primary schools are already struggling to complete lessons as teachers have to go for different types of training conducted by the department. After the implementation of the programme, only teaching and learning materials provided by SCERT are being taught to students and textbooks are being ignored. Something has to be done to correct this,” R Doss, general secretary, Elementary School Teachers’ Association, said.