Ramnad school blazes a trail in online admissions

The government school has already started admitting students through online method by giving stiff competition to the private schools located in that area.

As the admissions to the government and government-aided schools have decreased over the years, the School Education Department had fixed a target of getting at least 50,000 additional new admissions in its state-run schools in the new academic year.

However, due to the total lockdown in view of spreading coronavirus cases in the state, the works related to new admissions in the government schools had come to a grinding halt.

With the administration staff in government schools, even in major cities, were scratching their heads how to get new admissions amid lockdown, the middle school in Ramanathapuram district, perhaps the first institution, have already secured more than ten new admissions online and expecting to get at least another 50 students by this month-end.

After getting permission from Ramanathapuram district education officials, principal of the middle schools S Thamizarasi encouraged J Senthilnathan, a tech-savvy senior teacher of the institution, to create an effective online platform for admitting new students this academic year. Accordingly, Senthilnathan developed an exclusive admission form in Tamil through Google, which was circulated to thousands of parents in the Ervadi taluk. “There are about ten private schools situated around our campus, which were preparing to start new admission process in different ways. We thought online admissions is the only way to get new students to our schools at this juncture or otherwise, it would be too late to start the admission process after the lockdown period ends,” Senthilnathan told DT Next.

“After consulting with few IT experts, I have decided to use Google Forms, which is a web-based app used to create forms for data collection purposes,” he said adding “accordingly, I have created a secured form through Google in Tamil version with several mandatory fields so that filling of applications through objective type will not be incomplete.” 

On the initiatives for getting admissions, Senthilnathan said, “we have collected database of the parents in our Ervadi taluk through Panchayat leaders and the link was circulated according to the database besides posting in several portals, including the district administration and panchayat office official Facebook.” 

Stating that more than 50 applications were received and of which 12 students were admitted, he said, “We expect additional 50 admissions this month itself.” According to him, at present, a total of 429 students were studying from Class one to Class 8 in the school with the availability of 12 teachers and three temporary teaching staff.