TS teachers decry state's move to hold CWSN training during Dussehra holidays

Hyderabad: Telangana Progressive Teachers Federation (TPTF) condemned the state government's decision to hold training for teachers to handle children with special needs (CWSN) from 26 to 30 September. The TPTF has also written to the additional director of education about this issue. They are yet to hear from the government.

Meanwhile, the training that started on Monday is being conducted through Zoom from 10 a.m to 4 p.m every day for five days and the teachers can attend it from their home.

When the government had previously scheduled this training for the initial weeks of September, the TPTF had requested to postpone it. In this light comes the new postponed dates of the training.

But the TPTF is unhappy with the new schedule because it falls during the holidays. Conducting training during this period is unfair, they say and claim that the teachers will also be in a celebratory mood. "Conducting eight hours of training a day for five days during the festival will deprive teachers of their vacations," read the statement by TPTF.

A week back, rejecting the SCERT Telangana's request to reduce the Dussehra holidays from 14 to 9 days to compensate for the academic loss, the Telangana director of school education had clarified that the Dussehra holidays will be from 26 September to 9 October. In this light, it is not right to conduct CWSN training for some teachers through Zoom, the TPTF said.

"Earlier, the teachers were asked to go to the school complex in every mandal, i.e., the main school in a mandal, and attend the online training from there. When these teachers went there, the burden of looking after the chores of the school fell on the other teacher who stayed back, especially in primary school where there are one or two teachers. This is the reason why we had asked the training be postponed," said Mutyala Ravinder, general secretary of TPTF.

Besides the shortage of staff, the TPTF also cited reasons like conducting the formative assessment 2 before 25 September and disturbance in school working hours due to the Telangana Integration Day celebrations. The TPTF had written to the state commissioner of school education seeking postponement of training to after the Dussehra holidays.

Ravinder also emphasised on the need for separate schools for children with special needs. "It is important that these students should have separate schools with specially trained teachers so that their difficulties are understood and they do not feel inferior," he said.