She’s just about 14, but Halima Afrose knows what she wants to be: the United Nation’s secretary general. Friday was a big day for her. With a score of 485/500, she had topped the Little Flower Convent’s blind school.
“I was expecting 490,” she said, “but I lost a few marks unexpectedly in English.” She lost her eyesight when she was two-and-a-half, after an illness. It was then that her parents, originally from Madurai, moved to the city just so she could go to a good school, said her father, who works with The Professional Couriers. “I want to move to a mainstream school now, so that I can experience what that’s like before college,” Halima said.
Most city schools for the visually- and hearing-impaired reported a 100 per cent pass rate, with toppers scoring well above 400 in many.
B. Khusboo, in the throes of anxiety, did not sleep night and refused to have breakfast till she knew her score, her father, Bharat Kumar, said. With 375/400, the 17-year-old was the highest scorer at Little Flower’s deaf school. “But I want to send in one paper for re-totalling. I was expecting a centum in social science but only got 195,” she said.
At Government School Higher Secondary for Blind, Poonamallee, all 20 students who wrote the exams passed, with top scorer Arun Kumar obtaining 432/500, said principal V. Gopal.
Just one student failed at CSI Higher Secondary School for the Deaf in Santhome, with 14 others passing, while at St. Louis Institute for the Deaf and the Blind, all 45 students passed. The top scorer at St. Louis Institute, J. Azeesh Rahman, with 478/500, said he wanted to do something with computers. “I breezed through most of the year and only studied towards the end,” he said.
While the maths paper was difficult for most students, the rest, barring possibly the languages, were a piece of cake.
For these students, the commerce stream seems a better choice, as with science, working in the lab may not be easy, they said. The task before them now, some said, was to try and get into a mainstream school to complete their education.
