A fully equipped school building is being handed over on Wednesday to Lokananda Maha Vidyalaya in Kiwulakale, Kottukachchiya, in the Puttalam district, NewsFirst reported. The school had been short of classrooms for years.
The shortage was severe enough that pupils were at times taught in the shade of trees, according to the report, and the lack of space made it difficult for both students and teachers to carry out normal academic work.
The position worsened when a fire recently destroyed a classroom housed in a temporary structure roofed with coconut fronds. The replacement building was provided after the school’s Principal made a request to Gammadda, the community development programme run by NewsFirst’s parent network.
A documented national shortage
The case is not isolated. Parliament maintains a dedicated Subcommittee on Shortage of Physical Resources in Schools, appointed by the Ministerial Consultative Committee on Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education and chaired by MP Samanmali Gunasinghe.
At a recent sitting, the subcommittee reviewed the World Bank-assisted General Education Modernization programme, told officials to speed up the work and asked for a detailed progress report. It also pressed for action on sanitation and drinking water in schools, with particular attention to water quality and safety.
Government spending on school infrastructure has featured repeatedly in recent weeks. Cabinet approved Rs. 1.6 billion for printing 2027 school textbooks this week, and the Prime Minister last week set out progress on connecting schools to digital networks, where 3,609 schools have been connected and a further 2,616 are in progress out of 6,225.
Not reported: the number of classrooms in the new building, its cost, the size of the school’s student population, and the date of the fire were not given.
