From average school to educational oasis

Government High School Kuoro Goth mixes existing infrastructure and modern facilities

KHAIRPUR: Believe it or not, four-year-old Rukhsana Inam of kindergarten-II and 15 schoolmates walk an hour to reach their school in Jumma Goth every day.

But Rukhsana's one-hour walk is worth it, because the kids end up at a state-of-the-art school established between date palm farms in a small village named Kuoro Goth in Khairpur.

The 14-room school in a ground plus one building is not what one would imagine a government school to be. Hidden amid the farms, Government High School Kuoro Goth is a perfect example of an amalgamation of existing infrastructure and modern facilities.

The school is equipped with state-of-the-art computer labs. PHOTO: COURTESY USAID

With science and computer laboratories fully equipped with computers and apparatus, the red stone building has been designed to provide students the best environment to study.

The school is the only government school within a five kilometre radium, shared headmaster Ali Madad. "The primary and elementary schools were merged to form this school when it was inaugurated on April 7, 2016 and was upgraded to the status of a high school," he said, adding that the then chief minister and minister for education, Qaim Ali Shah and Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, along with Bakhtawar Bhutto Zardari and former US consul-general Brian Heath inaugurated the school.



The school is coeducational institute and is running without any gender disparity, shared the principal, adding that initially the school was for boys but despite the change, some official documents still mention it as a boys’ school.

The school has its own water filtration plant. PHOTO: COURTESY USAID

Madad said the school was constructed as part of the USAID’s Sindh Basic Education Programme, under which 106 schools are to be built Dadu, Jacobabad, Kashmore, Kamber-Shahdadkot, Larkana, Sukkur, Khairpur and Karachi.

The project started in 2013, while the construction of the Kuoro Goth school started in 2014 and was handed over for 10 years to the Charter for Compassion (CFC) under a partnership agreement with the provincial education department. The partnership pertains to the management of the schools’ administrations and was signed in 2016.

The school currently educates 642 students, a rise from last year, when the enrolment was 281 when the elementary and primary schools were still in existence. There are 480 boys and 162 girls in the school.

The school was initially an all-boys school and later converted into a coeducational institution. PHOTO: COURTESY USAID

Kuoro Goth is the only school for students from areas as far as 9km away. The school also provides pick and drop services from Khairpur city. The teaching staff includes 10 government teachers, including the headmaster, and 15 teachers have been hired by the CFC and are being trained regularly on capacity building, lesson planning, content development and teaching methods, said the school’s CFC coordinator Abid Ali. There are also nine non-teaching staff serving at the school as a driver, conductor, sweepers, watchman and peon.



In order to develop a greater level of education and ensure the teachers are up to the mark, the school administration has set up a training system for which a separate training coordinator has been hired. The coordinator is responsible for training teachers every day for an hour. "Nowadays we are working on lesson planning training," shared the training coordinator, Mirza Bilal Baig.

"We also are keen to develop students’ creative skills and support them to become confident members of society," said the headmaster, adding that they have assigned days for the classes to arrange assembly proceedings and awards are given to the best teams to develop their confidence and intellectual levels.

The school is the only one in a 9km radius. PHOTO: COURTESY USAID

All the school buildings built under this project are disaster-proof and have their own water filtration plants installed. The water is filtered twice before being provided to the students for drinking purposes. The Kuoro Goth school building has 50 full sized solar panel plates installed on its terrace, which are enough to cater to the usage of electricity for the whole school.

CFC manages everything in the school from the salaries of the staff to the petty maintenance of the school, for which they are given a specific amount of money by the education department.

A separate clinic has been established at the school where students and their parents can come for check-ups and the doctor can refer them to city hospitals if their ailments are serious. As the locals cannot read or even speak Urdu, the doctor has devised a mechanism that includes referrals on coloured paper, with each colour signifying the degree of severity.