Benue govt to grant partial autonomy to schools – Uji

Executive Secretary of the Benue State Teaching Service Board (TSB), Professor Wilfred Uji yesterday said government is negotiating to return grant aided mission schools to the private owners.
Uji who made this known in an interview with newsmen after a meeting with principals of public secondary schools in Makurdi, noted that government was only considering partial autonomy to the schools to check issues of abuse.
He explained that a certain level of agreement has been reached but government was careful about complete autonomy to the schools to prevent issues that will result to chaotic situations in the education system in the state.
“The dialogue is still on between government and mission schools and very soon the government is going to give them some level of autonomy so that they will run the schools the way they want.
That battle has been going for a long time.
“But Government is being careful about the autonomy to check issues of exploitation, proliferation of mushroom school and other issues, such as irregular fees structures, chaotic programmes.
“In every modern society, all over the world, it is the state that is involved in regulating the schools so the sense of absolute autonomy is not simply possible,” he added.
He said the board has introduced biometric capture to check sharp practices by school teachers in the state.
He noted that the biometric will eliminate issues of age falsification and documents mutilation by teachers to extend their years in service.
He also said with the biometric capture, teachers who have reached retirement age will be automatically dropped from the payroll of teachers in the state and their names entered on the retirement list.
“We are doing biometric capture of the teachers part of which is to check this fraud so that once you reach the age of retirement the system drops you automatically, transfer your name to retirement list for you to commence process for payment of your gratuity.
“So, the ICT is not only for teaching programmes alone, it will check other things such as sharp practices too and eliminate other fraudulent issues by the teachers,” he said

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