ANNISU-R to protest fees of institutional schools

KATHMANDU: All Nepal National Independent Students Union-Revolutionary (ANNISU-R) affiliated to CPN-Maoist on Saturday announced protest against institutional schools demanding implementation of past agreements.

Issuing a press statement here today, ANNISU-R said they would smear soot on ‘educational mafia’ if their demands were not fulfilled.

The statement said that ANNISU-R cadres will be submitting the copies of the five-point and 10-point agreements to all institutional schools in the first phase.

The five-point agreement was inked between the government, private schools and student unions on April 19 regarding revision of tuition fee that had been hiked by the schools, developing a scientific fee-fixing system, taking action against schools that were fleecing parents, and others.

Similarly, another tripartite agreement reached on May 14 was to waive 15 days’ tuition fee for the month of Baishak (mid-April to mid-May) when the schools were closed due to the April 25 earthquake and its frequent aftershocks.

The statement said the protest programme would begin from mid-July.

Many schools have not waived the 15-day tuition fee of Baishak. So the students were going to give a week’s ultimatum to the schools to return the fee for that period to parents through a memorandum. If any school refused to return the fee, they were going to padlock the account sections of the schools from July 17.

The student union has also decided to blacklist schools that don’t return the fee for the 15 days of Baishak as well as schools that have hiked the fee illegally.

The union has appealed to schools not to charge tuition fee from students until the government develops a scientific fee-fixing system.

Stating that the school monitoring done by the government team mobilised by Department of Education was not effective, the union has decided to monitor private schools themselves.

Other demands of the students include, giving Nepali names to schools/colleges that are using foreign names, transparency in scholarship distributed by Higher Secondary Education Board, bringing the plus-two level into school education and free school uniform and textbooks for students of government schools.