As a part of the Mission 100% campaign launched to motivate government school students to work hard for upcoming board exams, Punjab education minister Harjot Singh Bains Wednesday, directed the district education officers (DEOs) to deploy 749 Block and District Mentors (BM and DM) of science, mathematics and english/social studies in schools with an immediate effect. Currently, the teachers who were appointed as DMs and BMs were doing field work by visiting various schools instead of full-time teaching. Bains said that currently 680 teachers of these subjects were doing field duty as block mentors and 69 teachers as district mentors instead of teaching in schools. He said that the purpose of the 'Mission-100 Percent' campaign was not to get hype by presenting fake statistics but to increase the learning efficiency of every student by improving the quality of education. Bains said he had received reports from some districts that departmental rules were not followed while deploying mentors, which clearly state that no mentors be deployed in middle schools, but only one mentor in single-teacher middle schools can be deployed. Similarly, schools in remote and backward areas which are suffering from staff crunch should be covered first. Then schools with 50% staff and those in a dire need for a teacher should be covered. Likewise, mentors should be deployed in schools where there is no teacher of these subjects. Bains said that prejudice or bias against any teacher should be avoided and these deployments should not be done in big schools where only a few posts are vacant, in urban areas or schools near cities. Bains said that these deployments will be done till further orders and written orders in this regard will be issued today by the District Education Officers of the secondary department who will be solely responsible for making these deployments transparent and effective manners. He said that now before the half-holiday, the teacher or head of any school will not mark as on-duty for any meeting or office work and if he has to go somewhere for urgent reasons, he must first get approval from the concerned District Education Officer. He said that these teams will also focus on schools with low results and all the members of the improvement team will visit the classes of that school. Instead of teaching and giving instructions, they will act as model teachers by making unique presentations in front of teachers and students.
