Education crisis in capital as FDE schools Teachers to Protest Today

ISLAMABAD: The capital's education crisis appears to be worsening, as teaching and non-teaching employees from 390 schools are scheduled to go to the streets starting today (Thursday) to protest the proposed placement of schools under the yet-to-be constituted local government.

On the other hand, the walkout is affecting around 200,000 kids, who have already suffered significant losses as a result of earlier school closures due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

Before marching to Parliament House, the teachers will organize a protest outside the National Press Club. The principals of the schools permitted their employees to use school buses to get to the protest site on Wednesday.

After the local government elections, the federal government intended to place all schools under the Metropolitan Corporation Islamabad (MCI), according to representatives of the teachers' community. They added that they would not operate under the corporation.

Classes will be boycotted until the government repeals the Ordinance, they stated, adding that they might give the federal government a few days to change its decision, and if it did not, they would organise an indefinite sit-in next week.

In Islamabad, local govt elections are expected to take place in March-April, with the elected mayor taking on the role of reporting officer to the director general of the Federal Directorate of Education (FDE), which regulates 390 schools in the city.

The FDE was meant to oversee 423 schools and colleges until November 22, but the Ministry of Education placed 33 colleges under the Education College to keep them under the ministry's control.

Schools would stay closed until the government withdraws the ordinance, according to Chairman of the Action Committee Fazal Mola and Vice Chairman Malik Ameer Khan.

They claimed that the local government had nothing to do with education and that the education sector should remain under the education ministry. They also claimed that the local government could not handle the huge manpower and budgetary demands of FDE-run schools, citing the federal government's annual expenditure of billions of rupees on development and non-development expenditure.

"We observed the mayor's inability to pay sanitation workers' salaries during his previous term; how can the next mayor assure seamless funding for the education sector?" This is unacceptably bad; why is the government interfering with education? "The prime minister should look at this," said Malik Ameer Khan, president of the School Teachers Association.