TAXILA: Declared the “house of learning” by the education department, a title which is emblazoned on its boundary wall, the students of a primary school in the heart of the city have to pass by heaps of garbage and animal waste to get to the building and do not even have rugs to sit on in classes, let alone proper furniture.

Students of the Banni Mohalla Primary School are from poor families that most cannot even afford a uniform.

Established in 1981, the school lacks basic facilities including chairs, desks, rugs and white boards and is even short of classrooms and proper grounds.

Just five classrooms cater to the 460 students of the school, with each room having to house three sections for the day and when it rains, students from five additional classes have to be accommodated in each of the rooms. Thirteen teachers are employed to teach the more than 400 students, all in five classrooms.

“The school was established on seven marlas of land, which could never have been enough to house a whole school. They do not have space for physical activities and cannot even hold a full assembly,” said Malik Liaquat, a local social worker.

He said the school falls in the constituency of PTI MPA Taimoor Masood Akbar who had repeated his party’s claims of bringing about change. However, Mr Liaquat said, the MPA has not even visited this school since the coming into power three years ago.

Talking to Dawn, the president of an NGO working in the education sector, Asim Meer said that the condition of the primary school in question portrays the reality of class-based education in the country and that schools for children from lower income families lacked even the basic facilities.

According to the school administration, most students fall ill either from sitting on the cold floor in winters or due to passing by heaps of garbage and animal waste each day on their way to and from school. They said smaller children were unable to step over garbage as well, especially when it rains.

A teacher at the school, Aneeqa Tabassum said that due to the shortage of classrooms, teachers could not give students as much attention and that the congested classrooms were particularly hard to sit in during the summers.

A teacher who requested to not be named said that the school administration had sent the education department many reminders for taking notice of the school’s condition and to provide it with basic amenities, and that the school have never received a response.

Talking to Dawn, the principle of the school Najma Shaheen said that the local and district authorities were aware of the school’s condition. She said officials from the education department as well as a district monitoring team had visited the school and made recommendations for the provision of facilities, which were yet to be complied with.

She added that a vacant plot nearby is government property and that the education department has asked the Cantonment board and the revenue department to hand over the land to the education department so that the five classrooms the school needs can be established.

When asked, Deputy District Officer Education Abdul Khaliq said that MNA Ayisa Zaib Tanloi has brought the matter into the notice of the secretary education Punjab.

He added that the education department planned to establish more classrooms on the land used by locals to dump waste on and that the rest of the problems will also be addressed soon.

Published in Dawn October 24th, 2016