As many as 34 Class X students of a private school in the city have not received hall tickets for their CBSE board exams set to begin on Monday, leaving parents, students, and teachers irate and confused.
“We were asked to assemble near the school and collect the hall tickets on Wednesday. But on arriving, the management told us that the school had not registered the students for the exams,” said Francis Xavier, whose son, a student of Arooja Little Star School at Moolamkuzhy near Fort Kochi, was all set to write his Malayalam board exam on Monday.
Parents and students are worried that the negligence of the school might mean that the students will have to wait for two years to write the exams, Mr. Xavier said.
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“Since the registration is done in Standard 9, they will have to repeat 9th and 10th classes if they do not write the exam this year. But we are hoping that an intervention or a special order could help them write the exam next year at least,” said Shruthi Pradeep, a Standard 10 class teacher.
Meanwhile, students and parents protested outside the school on Friday and met V. Muraleedharan, Union Minister of State for External Affairs, who offered support. Why the school had not registered its students for the exams a year in advance as required is not clear even to teachers, Ms. Pradeep said. “We had submitted students’ details for registration and were told that it was done. Since the school does not have CBSE affiliation, for the past seven years the management has been making arrangements for students to write exams in different affiliated schools each year,” she added.
Parents and teachers had presumed that a similar system would be followed this year, but they recently learnt that the other schools the management had approached for a tie-up had rejected the request to allow students to write the exams on their premises.
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Though parents and teachers had been enquiring about hall tickets for the past few weeks, they were not informed about the problems in registering students, Ms. Pradeep said.
“The management would have known by October last year that the students were not registered, and that their request to the CBSE Board to conduct exams directly were rejected. But no action was taken, and we were not warned in advance,” she added.
The school management was not available for comment.