Pressure wins separate restrooms for boys and girls

KARACHI: After having to make do with crude, makeshift facilities, including common restrooms for boys and girls and crossing busy roads to reach their canteen and computer lab, Bahria Foundation School students will return from their vacations happily.

They will be moving from the improvised old campus to a new one as the school administration finally gave in to the demands of concerned parents who had asked for an immediate transfer of the students from the old campus - which was a temporary school building where the primary- and secondary-school students shared their classes with a beauty parlour and a tenant.

They have now been moved to a new bungalow with comfortable and spacious classes - and, of course, separate restrooms for boys and girls.

“We gave them a deadline of May 15 to change the premises. They assured us that by May 31 they will move the school to a new and better-equipped campus,” a parent told The Express Tribune. However, since one of her daughters is a secondary-school student, she was still concerned about the secondary classes to continue in the old campus.

While the principal of the school is out of the city, the Personal Assistant of the principal, Mairajun Nadeem, told The Express Tribune that it is a temporary problem and will be fixed soon.

“We had received court orders to vacate an older building and, because of the notice issued at the eleventh hour, we moved to such a location,” he said, speaking in the school administration’s defence.

The school’s primary and secondary section, which was in the college building earlier, was moved to the current location on April 1.

He said that the new building, where about 250 primary-school students will be moved, is capacious and the authorities also plan to add a new section to each class in the future.

“We are currently moving 10 sections to the new campus but we have 26 rooms there. So we plan to increase the number of students in every class,” he said.

The parents are resting assured after they were shown that the classes and the building are much better than the older one.

“We were told on the last day of school, which was May 31, that students will go to the new building from August 1. This is a big relief,” a parent said.

Another parent, however, alleged that the school does not have qualified teachers. “They charge Rs2,700 for primary school, Rs3,200 for middle school and Rs4,700 for their higher secondary school.

The least we can expect from them is to have qualified teachers, which they don’t,” he said.

Denying these remarks, Nadeem said that the Bahria Foundation School has a strict policy of only appointing teachers with post-graduate degrees for their secondary section and teachers with graduate degrees for their primary classes.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 25^th, 2010.