The school, having six classrooms and a room for office, has no furniture. The pupils, about 300, including 200 girls, sit on the empty guinea bags and pieces of cloth they bring along.
It is a bit mysterious that a few new ‘darries’ are staked in the office but not given to the pupils. A teacher explained that the mats were too precious to be spoiled on the broken floor. “We have bought them with small donations collected from the children,” said Rafique Ahmed.
But a man visiting the school criticized this attitude of the school administration saying the mats could not be more precious than the children’s welfare. “The winter is approaching and the children would feel more uncomfortable sittings on the sacks.”
There is no arrangement for drinking water for the students or their teachers. A small cooler in which they fetch water from neighbouring houses is not sufficient for their needs.
When asked for the direction, one of the two boys riding a bicycle said: “Go straight looking to the right and when you see a house with most of the boundary wall vanished, this will be the school!”
The gate is standing, supported by two fragments of the wall on either side. It is, however, closed and nobody uses it. The collapsed wall provides an easy access into the school to children, teachers as well as to stray animals.
Part of the collapsed boundary wall is covered with logs to prevent small children from stepping into the pool of sewage along the school boundary (or where one was supposed to be).
The lone toilet has long been abandoned. Some small boys still use it, but the girls go home when they need to. The male teachers rush to the nearby mosque’s toilets and the women to some cooperative neighbours’ houses.
Dr Hameedur Rehman, the headmaster, has a team of three men and three women teachers. Besides, the school has on its rolls a woman peon and a chowkidar.
The woman employee of the school besides dusting and cleaning prepares tea for the teachers. But when the Dawn photographer visited the school, two girls were washing the dishes the teachers had handed them.
The headmaster had come close to getting Rs500,000 approved for the building. But the change of the government on August 14 spoiled his efforts. He is trying anew and hopes to get the building completed before his retirement, due shortly.
The school is built on a 240 square yards of land that was initially earmarked for a mosque, says Omar Khalid Chhurra, president of a local NGO, the Friends of Bhitai Colony.
According to Mr Chhurra, the original school was shifted away and named Hajirabad Government School, which has been upgraded to high school.
This school was named Government Boys Primary School No 2. But the girls now outnumber boys. This could also indicate parents’ preference for good education for their boys which they are not likely to get at this school. A few good private schools also exist within and near the locality.
The floor is potholing, the walls pockmarked. The teachers are usually dedicated, but not necessarily punctual. One woman teacher comes from F.B. Area, another from Garden.
Zeenat, coming from Garden, finds it very difficult to come to the school as she has to change at least two buses to reach here. She has been teaching here for the past 10 years and she feels quite attached to it. But now, because of her mother’s failing health, she wants to be transferred to a school near her home.—Naseer Ahmad