School headmasters empowerment welcomed

School headmasters empowerment welcomed
Lahore: The recent decision of the Punjab School Education Department authorising school headmasters to surrender any teacher for poor performance is being seen as a positive development.

The empowerment of headmasters had always been a demand of the academics and teacher associations. The powerlessness of heads of institutions was thought to be the major hindrance in achieving better results and the best output from teachers. According to a notification issued last week, in case of unsatisfactory performance or conduct, the heads of elementary/ secondary/ higher secondary schools were authorised to surrender any of the teaching or non-teaching staff members to the respective transferring authority.

"The officer holding additional charge may also exercise this power provided said officer is not lower than a secondary school teacher in case of elementary or high school and not lower than a subject specialist in case of higher secondary school".

"The Transferring Authority shall adjust the surrendered incumbent in some other school", the notification concludes.

Sources in the department said upgradation of hundreds of government schools into English medium schools had prompted the high ups to take the decision to empower the school heads as they wanted results for success of this initiative. They added the move would help a lot in addressing the faculty issue as without good teachers the good initiative might become an embarrassment for the government.

However, academic circles are also critical of any misuse of this new power saying personal likes or dislikes may bring disastrous results. They are of the view that the department should also issue detailed guidelines to heads of the schools so that the misuse of power may be strongly discouraged to achieve the desired results.

Students are once again upset because of power crisis as ongoing loadshedding has been badly affecting academic activities both at homes and academic institutions.

The worst hit among the students are those studying computer sciences and those preparing for different upcoming examinations. They argue that the unavailability of electricity was adding to their problems.

The students urged the government to come up with long term planning and solution to the problem so that they might get rid of ugly power crisis which has been playing with their future for the last few years. The news