Her room painted a cheerful yellow, Shephali Sarkar feels anything but happy after a call with an agitated parent.
The headmistress at Dhamua Balika Vidyalaya, a high school with 1,300 girls in South 24 Parganas district’s Magrahat, around 55 km from Kolkata, a disheartened Sarkar says she doesn’t have teachers for Class 12 anymore. “I don’t know how 99 of my girls will finish their syllabus now or prepare for their board exam (next year). This is a crucial year for them,” she says.
Stating that the entire School Service Commission (SSC) process had been “vitiated and tainted by fraud”, the Supreme Court had on April 3 upheld the Calcutta High Court order invalidating the appointment of 25,752 teachers and non-teaching staff by the West Bengal government in 2016. Of these, 17,206 were teaching staff.
Afraid of being charged with contempt of court for setting foot on the premises, Sarkar says three of the school’s 17 teachers have stopped coming to work since the verdict. All three, she says, taught Class 12 students, who are from the minority or tribal communities and belong to below poverty line families.
Stating that junior and part-time teachers were teaching Class 12 students at the school between 2011 and 2018, the headmistress said the appointment of these three teachers in 2018 through the SSC had brought “a semblance of relief”. A black ribbon on her rust-coloured saree in protest against the state’s handling of the issue, the verdict and the recent police action against agitating teachers, Sarkar says the school’s sanctioned teacher strength is 19.
Explaining her dilemma, the headmistress says, “Due to the verdict, I cannot ask the three teachers to return to school. We also don’t have adequate funds (at least `5,000 per head) to hire a part-time teacher immediately. We are also required to work on the state’s 18 welfare schemes. Without these three teachers and one group-D staff (for jobs like ringing the school or attendants for labs), it is difficult to keep the school running.”
The situation is equally grim in government-sponsored schools in other districts. While some schools are left with no teachers for Class 12 science students, a Bengali language teacher is taking geography lessons for now in another school.
A government-sponsored institution, Krishnachandrapur High School in South 24 Parganas’ Mathurapur has been left with just 48 teachers for its 5,607 students after the appointment of eight of its teachers was cancelled.
“All these eight teachers taught science to Class 12 students. We have 48 teachers managing 40 classes now. We also have nearly 4,000 answer sheets from science students that are yet to be graded. Losing eight teachers has not just affected classes, but also examinations, invigilation and grading of papers,” says Chandan Kumar Maiti, headmaster and school secretary.
Sukanta Dutta, an economics teacher at the school and an alumnus of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, was seen wearing a black badge while supervising an exam at school. “Our science and English departments have lost teachers. The science department has totally collapsed. It is impossible to run a school like this,” he says. His colleague Neha Mukherjee, a sociology teacher who was also wearing a black badge, adds, “Of the eight teachers who lost their jobs, seven taught science from Classes 5 to 12.” Despite the school’s decent infrastructure — it has a library, laboratories and 300 CCTV cameras — compared to other government-sponsored schools, headmaster Maiti says his students have been feeling the absence of these eight teachers.
A student of Class 8, Mampriti Mondal has been upset ever since she realised that her life science teacher had stopped coming to school. “Someone told me that she had lost her job. She was one of my favourite teachers.”
Arpita Chatu, a Class 6 student, appeared visibly distressed as she spoke about her “favourite” teacher losing her job. “My English is just as good as that of private school students because of my English teacher. She used to say that anyone can learn a language. I can’t believe she has lost her job,” says Arpita. At Rajarampur High School, located in Murshidabad district’s Lalgola block, senior students have been doubling up as invigilators for the school’s summative exams (formal assessments to evaluate student learning), since the verdict. Fourteen teachers from the school lost their jobs after the April 3 judgment. At present, there is no one left to teach mathematics, biology and geography in school.
“We are left with just 12 teachers for 3,300 students now. Since our first summative exams are on, I requested our senior students (from Classes 11 and 12) to step in as invigilators. It is impossible for us to teach all classes with our current staff strength,” says headmaster Manik Biswas.
The headmaster, who says he has called a meeting with parents and guardians to “discuss the crisis and look for solutions”, adds, “We are toying with the idea of tearing down the partition walls and merging classes.” In Purba Bardhaman district’s Selimabad High School, headmaster Basudeb Santra, who teaches Bengali language, has been taking geography lessons for Class 12 students since April 3.
“We lost two teachers. One of them taught geography, the other physics. We are left with just 15 teachers for over 1,200 students. Since we are down to one geography teacher, I have been pitching in to help complete the syllabus. However, this arrangement cannot go on indefinitely,” he says.
The headmaster also raised the issue of “confusion” over the salaries of the two teachers. “I have not yet received a notification or order from the education department on the two terminations. Their names are still up on the school’s salary portal but I don’t know whether they will still get their salary for April or not,” says Santra. He says, “It was painful to see so many genuine and good teachers lose their jobs suddenly, and get lathi-charged by the police for protesting against their job loss.”
Meanwhile, over 500 heads of schools from across the state met at Kolkata’s Sujata Sadan on Sunday (April 13) under the aegis of the Advanced Society for Headmasters and Headmistresses in connection with the issue of salaries of the recently dismissed teachers. At the meeting, society members claimed that multiple queries by them — over calls, texts and WhatsApp — to the school education department, the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE) and local education offices had allegedly remained unanswered.
“Legal experts have cautioned headmasters and headmistresses against signing attendance registers or processing the salaries of the dismissed teachers, saying that they risk being charged with contempt of court. No one — not the Education Minister, nor the DI (District Inspectors of Schools) Office — is giving us an answer on what to do,” says headmaster Maity, who is also the ASFHM state general secretary.
The ASFHM plans to write to the DI of Schools to seek clear directives on processing of these salaries. Besides calling for the reinstatement of all eligible teachers, the ASFHM has also demanded a “transparent recruitment process” to fill all vacant posts.