In fact his history as military officer may justify the current education sector status and give a clue to understand what teachers, academics and students had suffer from and still.
it's obvious why he is charging every protester teacher with treason.
Bahrain Teachers Society acted as teachers union; exist to help and protect teachers, the role of the BTS is against Dr. Majid Al Noaimi believes, has concluded into targeting Mr. Abo Ddeeb and Mrs. Jalila Al Salman, and all who was loyal/ member or even participate with the society, given concern to the country situation, so it was his best chance to hit tem.
Jalila sentenced 3 years and Mahdi 10 years.
this is how they are treating qualifications, in the contrary Ministry of Education are employing the volunteers during the strike, they are totally unqualified people, this is reach to the extent of a women over 50 does not know howto read or write, was employed as Social Supervisor affairs :)
A group of teachers are thinking to send a petition to the Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for Mahdi Abu Deeb to put pressure on the regime to be released.
I know you have worked in this issue and am sending this to your attention, maybe you know better more effective way to help.
We need to do something about the BTS to enlighten people as to why teachers are targeted this way.
Thanks again,
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"Bahrain Teachers Society was established in October 2000 under the law of the societies in the Kingdom of Bahrain.
Since its inception, it is working diligently to take care of teachers’ interests, developing the teaching profession and improving the professional and living conditions of teachers.
It tries its best to work with the Ministry of Education to achieve different teacher’s demands through its committees.
The society, led by its president Mahdi Abudeeb and his deputy Jalila AL-Salman, is one the establishers of Gulf Teachers Association and the Teachers Islamic Union.
The society president Abudeeb was elected as a Secretary General of the of the Arab Teachers Federation a year ago, in addition to being the regional coordinator of UNESCO in the field of education for all for the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula.
The teachers count the society as a means to raise the injustice they face from schools managers and officials of the Ministry of Education.
The society accomplished its full role in this area and its role keep growing between teachers and all employees of the Ministry of Education who are on the teaching staff and fall under the umbrella of the society.
In turn, the ministry takes into its account the existence of such entity. It became clear in all its statements to the presence of society and try to pull its cadres in various ways and temptations.
Yet ,they did not succeed and the society message is clear that excellence in teachers are the basis of the good of the homeland.
The society has to hold open meetings with teachers on regular basis, and created representatives to the society in various Bahraini schools in order to facilitate communication with the base field.
During these meetings the society aimed to recognize the concerns and problems of teachers and on their ambitions, in addition to share with them the future steps of the society and its movements.
Throughout society work, the Minister of Education refused to meet with the Board of Directors, not even once, despite the effort of the Council to set a meeting of this kind.
This reflects the Ministry’s vision towards the society and it seeks to end the work of the society which is a champion to teachers’ who suffer injustice.
The most important thing done by the society is the campaign that lead to improve the status of living conditions of teachers. The society with its strength, stability and good behavior brought 4 salary raises for teachers in only two years.
It established an ongoing training project for teachers, which aims to raise the professionalism in general by the representative.
In addition it provided educational services to various categories of the nation such as youth, people with special needs, and women.
Through this project it introduced many courses and workshops, many of them were for free, to the various groups.
Solving the immediate problems of teachers took the priority.
When the project of improving school performance began to in Bahrain, the society had undertaken a number of education and training workshops for teachers to be able to apply what was required to serve the educational process.
Jalila AL-Salman had a prominent role in this area where she introduced a large number of these workshops at many schools in Bahrain for free, personally supported by her and also by the society, driven by her belief that the societies leading role in turn supported teachers and the Ministry, and reflected on the country in general.
When the revolt began on 14th of February, the society did not show up until after the crown prince and king announced that the peaceful sit-in was LEGAL and it that it was an expression of the citizen's rights. Only then (and after a lot of teachers claimed they were affected), the society bowed to their demands and supported the people in order to follow-up on the teachers problems more closely.
The following days proved the validity of the decision; the society received hundreds of complaints about the abuses suffered by teachers and students inside schools along with photographs and documentary video evidence. These have been presented to the lawyers to take legal action but they did not seek to achieve this.
Druing the period of protests and after, unbelievable things have happened at schools in Bahrain. No one can imagine that these things happened here in this small country unless it was told by witnesses who were directly affected in person.
A number of school principals permitted the persecution and humiliation of students and allowed the conduct of loyalty marches within the walls of schools as an answer to what is going on outside throughout the country.
Also they allowed the riot police to break into schools and enabled the direct infringement of students - this was with the principals deliberate agreement.
One of the parents recalled what happened at her daughter school, when the principal called a large number of students and locked them up in the gym and then allowed the troops to beat them as they stood and watched.
In addition to that, a number of Ministry of Education officials visited schools and beat students and teachers, and threatened them with imminent punishment.
So too there was a the role for (pro-regime) teachers who were responsible for planting hatred in students’ hearts against their teachers who were protesting.
This was a big surprise to the teachers who were outside schools during Feb events. When the protesters returned to their schools they found that sectarianism had been planted and taken root in the hearts of many youths while they were out of school. And still it continues even now.
The society was forced by all of this to take concrete action to protect teachers and students after sending a request to the Minister of Education to do so.
And when the M of E did not, the society actively tried to ease the crisis at schools and protect students, teachers, parents and the country.
This was done by issuing several statements sent to the Ministry of Education to hold them accountability for what was happening and asking them to take their role on the stage - but there was no response.
The ministry continued what it was doing. Official media (television & press) continued in distorting facts and charged what was done by Ministry of Education to the BTS.
In an objective view to the real situation of education in Bahrain, after all these events, substantial changes had occurred which prevented Shia from returning to their professional positions and replaced them with pro-regime workers.
As a result: A large number of shia teachers was dismissed, hundreds were sent to military or civilian courts for trials, arbitrary transfers of work sites to other sites, Schools for Shiites and the other for Sunnis were determined, programmed temporary dismissal (10 days for most teachers), salary deductions, volunteers (6000) were recruited, the majority of them do not have the appropriate qualifications to the duty of their job and a large number of teachers from Egypt and Saudi Arabia (2500) were imported.
Those can be taken as real evidence of premeditated intention to evacuate the school from Shiite teachers as a punishment for their participation (or not) in the recent protests.
At the time that Bahrain schools work on improving schools performance and with all the large budgets allocated for that, observers can see the corresponding behavior of the Minister of Education in recruiting those without any qualifications (most of them did not finish high school) to teach in the schools.
It is ironic that the ministry which has always claimed the lack of budget to meet the needs of schools (teachers) raises the number of teachers from 13 thousand to more than 21 thousand by a stroke of a pen, and this is what leads us to say that the budget is wasted and was used in the wrong direction.
Those who act as disguised unemployed will drain the ministry budget. It can be seen that this is the result of the militarizing of the educational system in Bahrain which badly affected the teaching and learning process. The latest national exams result is proof of this bad impact (results drop drastically). Being away from school could not have this negative impact on the educational output in Bahrain - the recruitment of under qualified persons as teachers did."
