All vacancies in school will be filled up by June 1, 2007 and appointment orders will be issued within a week to 4,868 teachers who have already been appointed, said Primary and Secondary Education Minister Basavaraj Horatti.

The finance department has approved the recruitment of 6900 teachers within the next four months, he added.

He was speaking at the awards ceremony of ‘Karnataka Learning Partnership’ [KLP] here on Thursday organized by KLP in association with Akshara Foundation and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. Awards were given away to 75 schools, nine Cluster Resource Persons and Block Education Officers, in recognition of their contribution in making KLP successful.

KLP presented the findings of its Accelerated Reading Programme [ARP] conducted in 1309 government primary schools in Bangalore.

T.M. Vijay Bhaskar, Education Secretary said they had done baseline assessment of 1,76,235 children studying in 2 to 7 standards in 1410 government primary schools in Bangalore Urban district. Fifty per cent of them were found lacking reading skills.

So, in the first trimester, 69,800 children were put through the reading programme. About 4355 specially trained teachers conducted it by using about 45 story cards.

In a programme on which Rs. 2 crore had been spent, he said, 64 percent of the children had benefited. Approximately about 45000 children learnt to read in just three months.

And, 95 per cent of the children were better equipped than before while only 2 percent of them remained at the zero level.