What are the odds? 18 teachers for only five students at Azizabad school

School continues to receive Rs450,000 every month.

KARACHI:

A school in Azizabad faces a problem shared by very few of its counterparts in the rest of the country — it has 18 teachers for the only five students enrolled.

In the heart of Karachi, 12-year-old Saqib Saifullah, a student of class seven, is one of the five students enrolled at the Technical Age Government Boys Secondary School. The provincial education department dishes out Rs450,000 every month to its 18 teachers as well as six non-teaching staff from the taxpayers’ money, confirmed the office of secondary and higher secondary schools. This outrageous teacher-student ratio means students hardly acquire any education.

The school that once was built over a large area along with a cricket ground in the 1960s appears no better than the bombed out schools in Swat — roofless classrooms with not even a single chair for the students to sit on, broken windowpanes, crumbling or already collapsed walls covered with political graffiti, and toilets that seem to have been cleaned several years ago.



Nevertheless, the staffroom adorned with a green carpet appeared more like a meeting point for gossip, where teachers, wearing excessive makeup, sit and waste time.

One of them, when asked about the number of students enrolled, crackled with laughter, while her colleagues followed her cue. “How many students do we actually have?” she then inquired when the women stopped laughing to catch their breaths.

A blackboard in a roofless classroom revealed that the last combined class for all five students, enrolled in grades six, seven, and eight, was held around a week ago when one of the teachers might have felt gracious enough to teach them a chapter from a Sindhi textbook,  Ibne Battuta Jo Sindh Jo Safarnamo [Ibne Battuta’s travelogue of Sindh].

“At times, when they feel like coming to the school and also to the classrooms they teach us our course, otherwise they do not bother,” Saqib, wearing his shabby school uniform, told The Express Tribune. He only has one pair of uniform, which his mother washes once a week. The rest of the days he goes to school in casual clothes. Despite the problems, Saqib makes sure he goes to school every day.

The teachers blamed, however, the provincial education department for the poor maintenance of the school buildings. “Parents do not wish to send their children to such dirty and ugly schools. Who is to blame for that?” headmistress Risalat Fatima asked. “We are willing to teach but are restricted due to a shortage of sufficient funds.”

Abdul Wahab Abbasi, the director for secondary and higher secondary schools in Karachi, said the school had constantly been receiving management committee funds for its maintenance, adding that he had directed the relevant officials to probe into the amount of money spent. He had, however, nothing conclusive to say when informed by The Express Tribune that the situation was not restricted to just one public school in the urban centre.

“I have seen those five students studying under the sun in a roofless classroom. It was extremely saddening.”

Abbasi was, in fact, pleased to announce that his department would collect public donations to improve the status of the school on an emergency basis.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 4^th,2013.