SHUBHANGI SHIFA
Ranchi, April 25: Like the railways and the civil services, the British rulers had left behind a chain of fine schools — most of which have been ruined by desi rulers. Every district headquarters in British India had a Zila School which was endowed with land, playgrounds, buildings, libraries, labs, and good teachers.
One of these schools situated in Ranchi, also known as Amar Shaheed Thakur Vishwanath Shahdeo (ASTVS) Zila School is now set to get CBSE affiliation in the 2022-23 session among 24 other schools run by the state government.
A boys’ school for students, the Zila School imparts education from class VI to X and has got a plus-two section. However, it doesn’t have an attached pre-primary section. However, after CBSE affiliation, the school is gearing up to soon begin classes for students of classes 1 to 5. With eight classes already present, the school management is building new buildings to accommodate all classes that will begin from the new session.
Principal Deepa Chaudhary said, “The school presently provides three vocational courses including poultry management, office management, and medical laboratory technician training. It has eight classrooms for instructional purposes, while the two other rooms are for non-teaching activities. The school also has a separate room for the Principal. However, for additional classes, we are building a new building to accommodate classes from one to five. Other criteria required by CBSE will also be fulfilled.”
“It also has a library with 8870 books in it along with 12 computers for teaching and learning purposes of which all are functional. The school also has ICT labs for computer classes along with science labs for experiments,” she added.
While talking about the requirement of teachers, Principal Chaudhary said, “As per the CBSE criteria, there is a ratio for students and teachers. To maintain the ratio, apart from the already present 23 deputation, vocational and contractual teachers, we will also hire more contractual teachers.”
Notably, spread over 13 acres of land, the school was built in 1839. Then, it was the only English Middle School in the region and was, for a long time, a part of Calcutta University. The last European headmaster it had was T R Spillar in 1933-36. Alumni of the school still comprise high court judges, senior bureaucrats, and doctors.
Meanwhile, the state education and literacy department have already begun to train the principals of such schools to develop their leadership skills to lead the school operations for such schools. For this, the education department has registered 325 principles for training at the block level, out of which the training of 176 principals has been completed. The training of the remaining will be completed soon.
On the other hand, 740 teachers have participated in this training programme. In this 10-week training program, training has been given for the development of technical capability of teachers posted in schools subject-wise and for classroom conduction process, student-centered teaching. SCERT and DIET have been made completely effective for the training of teachers. Along with this, capacity development is being done through a continuous system of evaluation of teachers, improvement of quality of schools through State Teacher Parivartan Dal, motivation camp, educational demonstration of teachers, and other-oriented programmes.
