With schools likely to reopen for classes 10 and 12 from January after 10 months, several private school managements will be in a spot as they are facing severe shortage of teachers.
While some schools had sacked teachers as they were unable to pay salaries, teachers in other schools had quit their jobs after they faced salary cuts or were not paid on time during the pandemic. Many of these teachers had taken up other jobs ranging from farming, selling fruits and vegetables to starting their own small businesses out of their homes.
D. Shashi Kumar, general secretary of Associated Managements of Primary and Secondary Schools, said that while they were able to manage online classes despite shortage of teachers by combining different sections, the same will not be possible during physical classes.
Many school managements had in fact started paying teachers by the hour for online classes as they could not afford to pay them full salaries.
“Now, when physical classes resume next month, we will need our teachers back. But most of the teachers do not want to come back as they are earning better in their new jobs,” said the principal of a city-based school in north Bengaluru on condition of anonymity.
School managements had not paid salaries as they had said that a majority of parents had not paid the fees and they did not have a stable source of revenue and all their corpus amount was empty.
New recruitments
Jayaranganath, coordinator, Educate English Medium School, Karwar, said that while the schools needed more teachers than before as they had to conduct classes in shift system, they were in a dilemma of whether they should recruit new teachers. “Many of our old teachers have quit and we are not even sure if we should recruit teachers as we are worried we may have to close schools again if there is a second wave of COVID-19,” he said.
