Children studying at the Chennai Corporation Primary School in Annai Sivagami Nagar, Ennore have an artistic school building to come back to, when the Tamil Nadu government decides to reopen schools.
While they were deciding on carrying out regular maintenance and painting work for the school building, headmistress T. Vetriselvi said a teacher at the school, S. Vasugi, came up with an idea. “For a while now, she has been telling us we could paint the walls of the school building in a unique way, which is when the suggestion of painting it like a train came up,” Ms. Vetriselvi said.
On further discussion, the headmistress said they decided to go with the design of a Metro rail coach. “Children love travelling by train and as adults too, we often end up making friends on these journeys. Journeys usually evoke pleasant memories, and when the children come back to school after the COVID-19 break, we want them to be happy and excited,” she said.
The façade of the school has been painted like a Metro train, and a compound wall near the building has been painted to look like a station, with people walking on the platform. The mural has been done in such a way that the school doors are the doors of the train coach.
Sathya, who is among the painters involved in this project, said that they were happy to transform the school this way, for the children.
Apart from the building façade, the classrooms walls too have been painted with cartoon characters as well as educational content such as the solar system, English words for better communication and letters and numbers for the younger children.
The school has a student strength of around 300, from classes LKG to five.
