Shiva Gyaneshwar Lower Secondary School, situated just 500 meters away from the District Education Office, is getting the children acquainted with alphabets under the blazing sun due to lack of classrooms. [break]
The school is conducting morning classes under the shade of trees but there is no relief from the heat. “Students of bigger classes refuse to study in the open so we have made arrangement for students of grade one and pre-primary to study alternatively,” teacher Bhuwaneshwari Joshi said.
The school has a total of 350 students on its rolls. Eighty of them are pre-primary students.
“We have to run the classes anyhow,” Joshi argued. She explained that teaching junior students in the open is also easier.
“We have to teach for just three-four hours as the heat becomes intolerable thereafter,” she said. “I try to make them happy by singing songs and making them sing,” she revealed adding that the students frequently run for water to lessen the effect of heat.
“We have to shout louder while teaching as students get distracted in the open,” another teacher Devaki Bista said. She conceded that it was a torturous to make students study in the open during the heat of summer in the Tarai but reasoned that she alone can do nothing about it.
The school established in 1996 has been facing difficulty in conducting classes of lower secondary level.
“We have been making partitions in classrooms each year to accommodate new classes. We have already divided each classroom and there is no alternative to teaching in the open,” Principal Ganesh Prasad Aire said.
“We have no one to lobby for the construction of a building for us. “Only those schools whose teachers are leaders of political parties get help from other organizations,” he claimed.
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