Oyo State Government has urged Education Secretaries to impart discipline and sound morals on pupils in their respective Local Government Universal Basic Education Authorities for the overall good of the state.
Dr Nureni Adeniran, the Executive Chairman, Oyo State Universal Basic Education Board (Oyo SUBEB) stated this at a meeting with education secretaries on Wednesday in Ibadan.
Adeniran stressed the importance of the state’s religious diversity and the need to tolerate one another.
He said that their duties were not just about academics, but as vehicles for instilling moral values in their subordinates.
The chairman noted that education secretaries must ensure that teaching and non-teaching staffers maintained discipline in order to be able to impart sound morals and discipline in the pupils.
Adeniran also said that the state government would not tolerate religious intolerance and religious bigotry in public schools in the state.
According to him, every religion and law protects the lives of all citizens, adding that no pupil must be coerced into a belief system he/she might find unpersuasive.
“It is important that education secretaries must be self-disciplined, otherwise they will lose the right to discipline others,” he said.
Adeniran, while commenting on the lack of enough teachers in public schools, spoke about the possibility of redistributing of teachers across the state.
He said that there was the urgent need to correct the lopsidedness of teachers’ deployment in the state, adding that an intra-local government distribution would aid education in the state.
The SUBEB chairman, therefore, directed education secretaries to compile lists of teachers and pupils’ enrolments in all the school in their respective local government areas.
He warned them and the teachers under their supervision against extortion or imposition of unauthorized levies on pupils, stressing that anybody caught doing so would be sanctioned.
Adeniran said that the state government would not condone any corrupt practice by any education secretary or head teacher.
He stated that government had completed hundreds of school projects across all the local governments, adding that it would soon embark on completion of some projects abandoned by the past administration.
