Dadar school expels 40 kids in fee hike row

Mumbai: The Dadar-based Shardashram Vidyamandir school on Tuesday expelled 40 students, who were studying in KG junior and senior classes for not depositing their fees. The school authorities and the parents have been locked in battle over the fee hike issue.

Despite, pressure from various political parties, the school administration continued to stick to its guns on the issue. Parents protested outside the school campus on Monday to admit their wards in the school as they did not wanted them to miss classes.

Activists belonging to the Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena also visited the school to meet the management and talk about the fee hike.

The school administrative manager, Shubhash Jhadav said, “The Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena people came in support of the parents to our school. But since we are not owned by any political party, we are not going to be shaken.”

He further said: “Schools reopened in the month of June and we are already in mid-July. We have been constantly asking parents to pay up the fees, but they were not listening.”  Furthermore, the school claims to go by Maharashtra’s Fee Regulatory Act and is not violating any norms by the state government.

This is not the first time that parents and students have been protesting against fee hike.  Since the last academic year, private schools have been continuously raising their fees ‘illegally’. Many complaints have been made to various officials from the education department including the education minister Vinod Tawde. But no action has been taken till date by the authorities other than issuing a statutory warning. Some of these private school include, the Universal High at Dahisar, Lokhandwala Foundation at Kandivali, Thakur International at Kandivali.