The state government is expected to issue a gazette notification on Thursday announcing the rules, vacancy positions and reservations for the recruitment of school staff at the secondary and higher secondary levels.

Once the gazette notification is issued, the school service commission (SSC) will publish a recruitment notification on May 30 in pursuance of a Supreme Court order.

“The chief minister told a news conference on Tuesday that the fresh recruitment exercise will be held for 44,203 posts, both at the teaching and non-teaching level. The gazette notification has to state this formally. Besides, the recruitment rules, like the weightage of the written test and the academic scores, should be specified in the gazette. Based on this, the commission will draft the recruitment notification,” an education department official said.

Sources in the SSC said the gazette notification would clarify whether the advertisement for all 44,203 posts would be issued on May 30.

“The chief minister said at Nabanna on Tuesday that the notification would be for teaching posts only. But the 44,203 posts that she spoke about include non-teaching posts, too. So, we are awaiting the notification,” the official said.

“The gazette notification is also likely to mention the quota for OBCs and others.”

On April 17, the Supreme Court allowed the sacked but “not specifically found tainted” teachers to continue in their posts till December 31, by when a fresh hiring process must be completed.

A division bench of the apex court clarified that while the teachers “not specifically found tainted” could continue till December 31 — and are free to apply for fresh recruitment — they cannot claim any “special right or advantage” in the new process.

The apex court, which had on April 3 terminated the jobs of 22,753 school staff because the entire recruitment process carried out by the SSC in 2016 was “vitiated”, modified the order on April 17 following a plea from the state secondary education board.

An official of the education department said: “We are committed to honour what the Supreme Court said in its April 17 order.”

Some of the teachers who have been given relief till December 31 are still firm in their opposition to writing fresh tests, for which the government is coming up with a notification.

“The government is asking us to write the tests and has announced that in-service teachers will be given additional marks based on their experience. But what if some of them fail to clear the test? What will happen to them? They are having to write the test because of the illegality in the recruitment by the state government. So, if they fail, will the state government take responsibility for them?” asked Mehboob Mandal,a joint convener of the Deserving Teachers’ Rights Forum.

The Forum has been spearheading the teachers’ protest outside Bikash Bhavan, the education secretariat, since May 7.