Pvt schools look to profiteer

A set of recommendations by a Group of Ministers after an elaborate exercise with the parents, teachers and other stakeholders on private school fee regulation in Telangana has come to nought.

The tug-of-war between the alleged half-hearted efforts of the State government and parents continues to provide a grey area for the schools to profiteer.

According to the State School Education Department (SSED) sources, the recommendations include: (a) there shall be a school-level fee committee (SLFC) for regulating the fee at the school level. (b) the school level fee committee shall have 4 members, comprising representatives from the parents, teachers, principal and the management. The tenure of the committee should be of one year. As to the functioning of the committee, the Group of Ministers recommended that every school management submit a comprehensive audited report and the fees it intends to collect. Every school management must place these two components before the school-level fee committee three months before the start of the next academic year and get it approved.

There are two more mandatory stipulations for every school-level fee committee. Firstly, the annual fee hike proposed shall not be more than 10 per cent of what was collected in the previous academic year from the students in that school. Besides, the school fee should be collected only in a cashless digital mode. The sub-category of fees to be collected provides for the mandatory and optional. The mandatory fee will have only the admission and tuition fees.

The optional fee will cover other components like boarding, dining, transport, extracurricular activities, school trips, etc. The recommendations further said there shall be a State-Level Fee Regulatory Committee (SLFRC) headed by a retired high court judge. An eminent person from the field of education and the commissioner and director of school education will be its members. When a school-level committee fails to arrive at fixing the fee in any school, it has to be escalated to the SLFRC, and it will decide on all such issues.