Dist school edu dept yet to release final list of unrecognis

Times of India: Coimbatore: Friday, May 31, 2019.

The district school education department is yet to prepare the final list of unrecognised private schools and bring them to the attention of district collector, parents and the media, despite the march 29 deadline fixed for the same by the state directorate of school education has lapsed.

School education officials said they were still in the process of collecting information about the unrecognised schools and yet to compile a final list.

In districts like Chennai, the list of unrecognised schools was released on Wednesday. When contacted, a source with the school education department said they were still working on the list. Chief education officer R Murugan, however, said the final list would be available on Monday.

Pointing out that they had compiled a list of 49 unrecognised schools, another official in the department said some of them were said to have recognition but they had not uploaded their details on to the state’s online portal Educational Management Information System (EMIS).

However, this number is contested. S A Rajkumar, state president of Tamil Nadu Arts Teachers’ Welfare Association, said the department had in an RTI reply a few months ago said there were 132 unrecognised schools. “But now they are saying its 49, the numbers are contradictory.”

The communication from the state school education director on April 9 had asked block education officers to visit aided, partly-aided, nursery, primary and middle schools in their jurisdiction and inquire about the recognition status by April 23. Meanwhile, district education officers had to visit aided, partly-aided and self-financing higher and higher secondary schools in their jurisdiction during the period.

Following this, they were asked to share the list of such schools with the public and parents through newspapers and also by pasting notices in front of schools by March 29, besides alerting the district collector about the same.

However, when TOI contacted collector K Rajamani, he said he had not received any official report from the school education department on the subject as on Thursday. “I will inquire into it and seek the list of unrecognised schools.”