Salary pending for months, pvt school teachers ‘boycott’ online classes

CHENNAI: With only a few parents coming forward to pay their children’s school fees, more than 90 per cent of private schools in Tamil Nadu have not been able to pay salaries to their teaching and non-teaching staff for the last three months.

There are about 12,900 private schools in the State that have around 2.29 lakh teachers and more than 64 lakh students studying from primary to the higher secondary stage.

Most of the schools are dependent on fees to pay the salaries for their staff, and thus faced a serious fund shortage as many parents are unable to pay school fees due to job loss, salary cut or arrears during the ongoing lockdown.

DC Elangovan, secretary of the Federation of Associations of Private Schools in Tamil Nadu, told DT Next that more than 90 per cent of private school managements were not able to disburse salaries since April as they did not receive fees from the students.

“Though the State government has said that it did not stop the parents who wanted to pay the fees, many schools suffer a huge loss because of this,” he added.

Stating that only a few schools, especially in the cities, could pay salaries to their teachers and that too only till May, he said private schools in rural areas have been severely affected. Elangovan added that many teachers have stopped taking online classes as they are not getting paid.

S Maheshwari, an English teacher at a private school in Pallavaram, said that she and her colleagues did not get their salaries for the last three months. “There is no point in taking online classes without pay,” she added.

According to KR Nandhakumar, State general secretary of the Tamil Nadu Nursery, Primary, Matriculation, Higher Secondary and CBSE Schools Association, many private institutions could not collect last term fees from their students for the previous academic year.

He added that private schools even in the cities were paying only between 40 per cent to 50 per cent salaries to its teaching and non-teaching staff to keep the institution running for the next academic year.