TOBA TEK SINGH,.Oct 18:.The work being done by the Chief Minister’s Monitoring Force regarding inspection of schools in the district has improved educational activity and discipline in these institutions.
The claim was made by DO (monitoring) Fakhrul Islam Dogar when contacted for his remarks about the reports of growing unrest among the schoolteachers after the CMMF started working in the district a few months back.
CMMF officials had been given the task of checking the attendance of teachers and students, besides monitoring the development activities there.
According to a survey conducted in the district schools, the only reservation the teachers had regarding the CMMF was that the monitoring and evaluation assistants were retired armymen and less educated than them. It was said that most of the MEAs were just matriculate, so they had no right to monitor the qualified teachers.
Denying these accusations, the DO said as far as MEAs’ qualification was concerned, out of 22 assistants in the district not a single was matriculate. He said three MEAs were postgraduate, 13 graduate and the remaining were intermediate.
He also claimed that every MEA was given a motorcycle and directed to visit at least three schools daily in the area. So every school, out of total 1,444, in the district, was visited at least once a month by an MEA, he claimed.
He said now no school in the district was without teaching staff because of the CMMF efforts.
He said initially, a CMMF team found teachers playing cards instead of teaching in a school while another was found locked on a working day. But now due to the repeated inspections there were no such complaints. He claimed that in record 700 local schools, the contractors were forced to rectify the substandard construction work done by them after the CMMF team detected flaws in under-construction or finished buildings.
He said minor punishments given to some teachers by the officials like service break of a few days proved effective. Similarly, he said, the unlawful collection of funds from students had also been stopped and the distribution of free-of-cost books to the students was ensured by his team.
District Education Officer (secondary) Mian Hafeez also endorsed monitoring officer’s claims. — Tariq Saeed