School Hunt

Come October and it is happening time for the schools and a nightmare for many parents who are on the look-out for schools for their kids from pre-kg or pre-nursery to any grade.

A short intro on where we are and for what we are hunting for schools. Right now we are in Bangalore and we planned to put our daughter in Pre-kg for the academic year 2010-11. Most of us, our peers, would have studied in some normal / government schools except a few. And as any normal parent we thought of looking out for a good school where our daughter could get some more exposure than we have got during our school days.

And I never thought checking out for a school would be such a big challenge/learning experience. Yes, in deed it was a great experience for us before we zeroed in on a school which, at least we felt would be better than the rest.

Initially, somewhere around August, we started googling for CBSE board schools in the city and prepared a list of schools and took a print out of the same with the address and numbers. Then, we enquired our colleagues about the schools they feel is good. October came and we started our hunt for schools. We went to an area and searched for schools in and around that area with the list we had. We called up the phone numbers and found most of them were outdated. And we got the numbers of few schools through the JustDial service.

This way we went to 3/4 different areas and enquired in schools about the details like - fees, donation, whether they have some extra-curricular activities apart from academics, teacher to student ratio, if the school has playground and things like that. And our daughter got admission in a school in the first week of November.

In this process, we came to know one thing - admission in schools is a very big business. The reason why I say this is, we came to know through some of our colleagues that there are brokers to get a seat for pre-kg (not for BE and MBBS as it was during our days) and the cost for that is few lakhs it seems.

I just wanted to quote an incident happened to us in one of the schools. When we enquired for the direction over phone, we were told that they don’t have Pre-kg and they admit kids from LKG only. But we just wanted to look at the school and asked for the direction again. The response was "Why do you want to come when we do not admit kids for pre-kg?" and they just hung the phone. The school is one of the so called "good" schools. I was totally taken aback by this and I just told to myself, is this the one or similar one my kid is going to study in? But I had no choice and I had to choose the best among the worst
available. And we got admission for our kid in a good school.

Here, by good school, what I mean is that, we felt the school was good. With that assumption, we have given our kid a channel to start her academic / career / life. And we could do nothing more as finally it is the kids who, with the parent’s guidance, in future will show us if we chose him/her really a good school.

So, my take is, do not worry much about which school to seek for. All are good and bad. We can just go by our knowledge about the schools and expect for good things to happen. I am sure, good things will happen to all of us - the parents whose job of hunting for schools have become a terrific task these days!!!!

This content is published here: http://socyberty.com/education/school-hunt/