Punjab Education department has taken serious note of 10,000 absent students in 5th and 8thexamination conducted by SCERT. Education Minister held a meeting with the school heads and DEO’s to discuss this issue and find solution to bring back absentee students to the schools. Dr. Cheema directed the school heads and other senior officials to bring the whole date of absentees on record. He instructed the officials to motivate the absentee students and bring back them to schools.During the meeting Dr. Cheema said that permanent head teacher would be deputed in the schools having strength more than 30 students for which 8000 teachers will be promoted soon. To fill vacant posts 4500 ETT will be recruited within coming 10 days and advertisement to recruit 2000 teachers will be given in few days. Education Minister also informed that Rs 1.5 crore sports equipments have been purchased to encourage sports activities in schools, which will be distributed within 10 days and besides this Rs 7 Crore is being spent on strengthening school infrastructures, added Dr. Cheema.
Discussing the issue of dropouts some revelations which came out were that mostly dropout students are children of migrant labourers who leave school due to shifting of work place, some due to child marriage and some due to child labour. Due to misinterpretation of RTE Act and definition school heads list the name of absentee students in next classes due to which number of absentees increases. The Minister suggested to maintain two different registers to bring a solution to this problem and write the names of students in second register who remain absent for more than 45 days.Dr. Cheema decided to write to Deputy Commissioners to look into the matter of Child Labour and Child Marriages which is serious violation of law. The Minister also directed the officials to enquire into the cases of bogus admissions and submit a report. He also asked the officials to take regular help of NGO’s, local public representative (Panchayats/Councilors), other institutions and EGS/Education Volunteers to bring back dropout students to schools.Prominent among other who were present in the meeting included Mr. Pardeep Aggarwal Director General School Education, Mr. Balbir Singh Dhol, DPI (Secondary Education), Mrs. Pankaj Sharma, DPI (Elementary Education), Mrs. Gurpreet Kaur Dhaliwal, Director Administration, Mr. Sukhdev Singh Kahlon, Director, SCERT, Dr. Ginni Duggal and Mr. Inderjit Singh (both Deputy Directors), all DEOs and 121 school heads of 5th Primary and 264 school heads of Middle schools.