It is a unique tribute to the oldest school in Kerala by an alumnus: a website that records its history of 225 years, a database of all students and teachers for the last 70 years, www.sanjoboys.com.
The website is the result of ten months of painful single-handed effort by Anoop G, who had been a student at St. Joseph’s Boys School, Kozhikode, till 1996.
The website was launched earlier this month by Darius Marshal and Abraham Kennedy, who had passed out of the school in 1949. It features all available details on every one associated with the school since Independence, including students of 87 batches of sixth form, SSLC and Plus Two, around 18,000 students, more than 300 teachers and non-teaching staff.
“The idea behind the website is to bring onto a single platform all those who have studied and taught in the school, on the occasion of its 225th anniversary,” Mr. Anoop said. He had gone through all the attendance registers available in the school to come up with the data for the website.
The oldest names in the website are that of the 62 students who completed sixth form in 1947-48 and Fr. John D’Souza from Mangaluru, who was the head master of the school at the time of Independence. The website also features the photographs of most of the teachers, which have been collected from school magazines and souvenirs.
Mr. Anoop had filed an RTI with the Director of Public Instruction asking for the names of the old schools in the State, as part of his effort to create the ‘Sanjoboys’ website. The result confirmed that the 225-year-old St. Joseph’s Boys School, which was known as the European School of Malabar, was the oldest existing one.
