CTTU to strike on Teachers Day

[TamilNet, Sunday, 02 October 2005, 18:24 GMT]
The Ceylon Tamil Teachers Union (CTTU) gave notice to Dr Tara de Mel, Secretary of the Ministry of Education and Higher education, that its members will go on one day sick leave as a token trade union action on October 5 as the Education Ministry has failed to fulfill its promises regarding its twenty five demands. The CTTU said that it will be compelled to go on continuous strike from October 24 if the demands are not met.

October 5 is the World Teachers’ Day.

The demands include that all army sentries, checkpoints and barricades within a radius of fifty meters from the school premises, especially in the Trincomalee town and its suburbs, should be withdrawn immediately to create healthy learning and teaching environment. The CTTU demands also included agreement to allow resettlements of internally displaced families in their own lands in high security zones and to hand over all schools in the HSZ to the education department for reopening, CTTU sources said.

Some of other demands are:

• About ten thousand Tamil medium teacher vacancies still exist in Tamil medium schools in the northeast province. Immediate action should be taken to confer permanency to all volunteer teachers and part time English teachers now serving and also to recruit all unemployed graduates and Fine Arts Diploma Holders from Universities of Jaffna and Batticaloa to fill these vacancies.
• The Trincomalee Campus of the East University and Vavuniya Campus of the Jaffna University should be elevated to university status naming them as Trincomalee University and Wanni University respectively.
• The appointment to the academic and non-academic positions in the Sri Lanka Education Administrative Service (SLEAS), Sri Lanka Teacher Educators Service (SLTEdS), Sri Lanka principal Service (SLPS) and Sri Lanka Teacher Service (SLTS) should be made on the basis of ethnicity as the government has divided all schools on ethnic basis.
• All posts related to Tamil medium education development in the Ministry of Education which are suppressed should be restored with immediate effect
• Immediate steps should be taken to set up branches of the National Institute of Education (NIE) and the Department of Education Publications in the northeast province as the head offices of these institutions in Colombo are neglecting the Tamil medium education without adequate qualified Tamil medium staff.

   

  Email this article      Print this article      Feedback on this article