High demand for English-medium schools run by civic body necessitates allocation of extra classrooms to accommodate all students
Schools run by the Pune Municipal Corporation have been flooded with admission applications, and now the civic education board committee is in the process of allocating extra rooms to accommodate more primary students.
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As about 48 PMC English-medium schools in the city had been receiving a large number of applications since the past one week for the academic year 2012-13, most of the schools had to close the admissions before the usual date, resulting in unease among parents and students, who prefer English-medium schools over Marathi-medium ones.
“Even though all the classes are occupied, we are in a process of building four new classrooms in the building, where work is on at present,” said Shrikant Giri, principal of Gogate Prashala, a PMC school. “If the work doesn’t finish soon, we’ll have to wait till August or September before admitting extra students. But we are taking students as per requirements and admitting 40-45 students per class.”
As most of the schools received more than 100 applications per class in just a single day last week, the admission process for pre-primary students of junior and senior KG in most of them has already been closed.
Quality at low cost
The PMC, which has allocated a budget of over Rs 32 crore for 2012-13 to run its English-medium schools, has also been planning to collaborate with other, better educational institutions in the city and suggest they run a few PMC schools.
“We still haven’t decided how we are going to fit in students as we haven’t received any notice from the civic body. But we might make use of additional classrooms in our adjoining school building if needed,” said an official of MH Prashala in Wagholi.
Officials said that one reason for the high demand is that most English-medium PMC schools like Gogate Prashala from this academic year would be appointing teachers from an NGO, Teach For India (TFI), under the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) scheme for promotion of high quality education at lower cost, and parents do not want to miss the opportunity.
“We still have time till June and we’ll make sure that each and every student is accommodated. We have asked schools to make arrangements,” said Ramchandra Jadhav, PMC education officer.
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