Community schoolteachers demand salary

200 teachers have not been paid for more than a year

LAKKI MARWAT:

The female teachers of Basic Education Community Schools have been without salary for the past 14 months in Lakki Marwat district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P).

In the past, 38 community schools had been established in the district of which 35 have been closed without assigning any reason.

On Thursday these schoolteachers, along with their students, staged a protest demonstration outside the district office of the Elementary Education Foundation.

Schoolteachers blamed that they had been left hand to mouth due to the non-payment of salaries and thousands of students are out of schools too due to closure of these schools without any valid reason.

“First 38 schools were opened but later the PTI government closed down 13 schools. After that now 22 more schools have been shut.

Only three schools are functional,” they said, adding that this had affected the education of thousands of students.

“Our salaries are not paid for the past 14 months. We are poor people and have families. We demand that these teachers should be regularized and all the schools should be issued learning material immediately,” they said.

They also brought out a protest rally. Meanwhile, the president of Peoples Action Education Group, Swabi Amjad Ali has also demanded of the government to release the salaries and dues of 200 community schoolteachers across the province.

He said that these federal government schools provided education to 90,000 students.

After the 18th amendment these schools are run by Elementary Education Foundation and Fata Education Foundation. Community schoolteachers are working for the past three decades on contract basis and they are still waiting to be regularized and made permanent employees.

These teachers also work on meager salaries.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 16^th, 2022.