New era for rural schools dawns on 5 May

Work on developing 6,000 schools selected under Economic Development Minister Basil Rajapaksa’s combined national campaign to develop 5,000 elementary schools and 1,000 secondary schools is now nearing completion and will be ready for use by 5 May.

The program was launched in accordance with the ‘Mahinda Chinthana’ Vision Punarjeewana program with the participation of the Education Department, Provincial Education Departments, Ministry of Economic Development and other State institutions.

The work commenced on 5 April and Rs. 500,000 was spent on developing each school with the help of residents. For developing 5,000 elementary schools into child friendly schools 3,322 schools representing the island’s 25 districts were selected.  The funds allocated for the purpose is Rs. 1,661 million. Already 1,678 schools selected under the first stage have been completed at a cost of 839 million.  But its total value is twice the amount allocated for it. Under the second stage 4,322 schools have been developed.

The first stage was successfully launched in August 2012. Steps were taken for the supply of power and water, developing toilet and health facilities, building fences and providing schools with gates, repairing and painting existing school buildings, distribution of perennial economic crop seedlings to parents under the Divi Neguma National Program, making the school ground a model home garden, preparing the school’s name board, arranging rooms for Grade one students to do handwork, building children’s playgrounds and doing only essential repairs to teachers’ hostels if any.  

Improving education to develop human resources is also among the Government’s goals. These are in addition to mega development projects. Last year toilets were built in 8,680 schools in response to an appeal school children had made to the President.

This program has been welcomed by parents and the principal and staff of rural schools which until recently have been facing tremendous hardships and difficulties.

The objective of this is to minimise the competition to admit children to popular schools and also to provide them with a quality education after developing material resources and other facilities in schools.  This is a further step in improving Sri Lanka’s education, the level of which the UN’s Human Resources Report has recognised as being among the highest in Asia.