CAIRO: Two hundred and fifty faculty and staff started an open strike Sunday at Gamal Abdel Nasser Experimental School in Heliopolis, suspending teaching and all other activities to pressure the Ministry of Education to meet their demands.
“We are going on an open strike until all our demands are met,” said Ezzeldin Kheirallah, philosophy and psychology teacher at the school, and the spokesperson of the faculty and staff on strike.
“The main demand is to hire all faculty and staff on permanent contracts and pay them all their financial rights [such as bonuses],” he added.
Faculty and staff are calling on the minister of education to implement all the clauses of a ministerial decree issued in 2010 by then education minister Ahmed Zaki Badr.
The decree’s clauses stipulated that all faculty and staff be hired on permanent contracts and their financial rights guaranteed.
The decree had come in response to a previous strike by the school’s faculty and staff at Gamal Abdel Nasser School on Oct. 4, 2010, a few months before the January 25 uprising.
Since 2002, the school’s board of directors had been corrupt, headed by Mostafa Sabet, according to Kheirallah, who has been working at the school for 20 years with a temporary contract.
“For eight years, there has been continuous embezzlement and financial, and administrative violations and we have filed more than one complaint to the prosecutor general to investigate the issue,” he explained.
Teachers and staff filed a complaint to then minister Badr, and went on strike. The minister sent an investigative committee which found major violations, based on which he issued ministerial decree number 345 for 2010, dissolving the school’s general assembly and board of directors.
The decree also transformed the school from a private national school to a public experimental one.
“Since that day, no one implemented the ministerial decree, not even the current Minister of Education Gamal Al-Arabi, who was actually a deputy minister at the time of the negotiations and when Badr issued the ministerial decree,” Kheirallah pointed out.
At the time, Al-Arabi had told them that if it were up to him he would’ve hired teachers on permanent contracts within 24 hours. Kheirallah said that all the ministerial decree’s clauses were executed except the one pertaining to hiring the faculty and staff.
“We have notified the minister of our open strike, his officer manager told us he would tell him but no one contacted us yet,” said Kheirallah.
On the other hand, students have stopped coming to school since teachers suspended classes. Although parents acknowledge the lawful rights of the teachers, they are distressed nonetheless.
“We are greatly effected by this strike; our children are sitting at home not getting their right to be educated,” said Mamdouh Awad, head of the Parents Association, and parent to three students at the school.
Awad finds those on strike “looking for any minor problem to create chaos in the country when it’s at the dawn of democracy.”
However, the faculty finds it crucial that they get their rights in order to be able to maximize their productivity. “We have no identity, I have a temporary contract which states I work at a private national school when it is in fact now a public experimental school,” said Tawfik Hassan, who has been teaching for 15 years at the school.
“I feel lost, this entire issue is affecting us morally and will definitely have an effect on my teaching,” he said.
“We are not calling for anything that is not our right, which they have already acknowledged in the ministerial decree,” he added.
When contacted by Daily News Egypt, the school superintendent declined to comment on the issue.
