Mumbai: With the rising number of student dropouts in the Kalyan-Dombivali Municipal Corporation (KDMC) run schools, certain issues are being experienced by the existing students in these schools. One of them is the school Number 26 Jaibai School of KDMC where there are only 120 students left who don't get any provisions by the corporation like uniforms, books and bags, etc which is their basic right.
Along with this, because of lack of teachers in the school every day the students are given combined lectures where students from class 1 to 4 are made to sit in the same class.
The entire school is run by five teachers alone who are involved in both teaching and non-teaching activities. “From teaching to arranging the benches to painting the walls and cleaning the classrooms, all the things are done by us teachers,” said Nilesh Wable, who teaches subjects like English, Science and Hindi in the school. He further continued, “It’s not like we have been told to do the cleaning and painting work, but does that mean we should let our students be in an unclean atmosphere?”
From class 1 to 4, all the students are made to sit in a single class. “This is because there are fewer teachers to teach a subject in a specialised manner and the student count is low as well,” said Roshan Sarukte, team manager of CRY foundation who goes to this school on every Saturday to teach the students things that are out of the syllabus.
“Our focus is on the English subject, vocabulary, speaking skills, etc. This is something the student can use after his or her school days too,” Sarukte mentioned while the students in the classroom continued to recite poetry.
Talking about the drastically declining number of students in the school, Bhagwan Hamre, acting Principal of the school said, “There are parents who feel bad when they know their students are involved in the school work like cleaning or arranging the benches. Then they just chose some other private school, which according to them is better.”
Hamre joined the school 10 to 12 years ago when the school had more than 1,500 students while at present; in total they only have 126 students from class 1 to 7.
