Govt aided schools’ association seeks exemption from submitting sports fund

Ajay Joshi

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, February 20

While the Education Department has exempted government schools from submitting sports funds this year due to ‘Zero activity’ amid Covid-19 outbreak, in the academic year 2020-21, the district association of government-aided schools, too, has demanded a similar waiver.

During every academic session, Rs20 is demanded from each student as sports fund, which eventually gets submitted with the Education Department. While 80 per cent of the fund is kept for the department, 20 per cent stays in school for development related works. With the help of this fund, the department officials conducts various sports activities in schools. However, as schools remained shut during Covid, no such activity was organised. Hence, no sports fund was accepted from government schools.

Consequently, the association of aided schools said: “Aided schools once played an important role in spreading education in Punjab, but in most occasions, they are exempted from government policies. Similar to government schools, children in aided school also hail from humble background, yet they are excluded from several policies.”

In this regard, a delegation of the association met the District Education Officer (DEO), recently, under the chairmanship of Manish Agarwal, the state press secretary of the association, to submit their letter of demands to the education secretary, but to no avail.

Agarwal said: “Considering the relaxation provided to the government schools, the 80 per cent fund portion of the year 2019-2020 should not be demanded from aided schools. The additional fund would help the school heads in initiating development woks in their respective school. Aided schools also suffer huge economic crisis during the pandemic. Besides, facilities, including smartphones, grants for uniforms, computers and infrastructure, smart classrooms, development of science labs etc. should be provided to aided school students as well.”

District Jalandhar unit of the aided school comprising president Pradeep Singh, state secretary Lal Das, secretary Jasveer Singh, Jugraj Singh, Chandar Shekhar demanded immediate consideration of their demands.