The Department of School Education and the Chennai Corporation have sent out circulars to HMs of all schools in the state to carry out door-to-door campaigns in their respective areas.

A District Educational Officer of a district said that they had decided to identify prospective children and do the admission on the spot at the house of the child, just with the date of birth certificate. Heads of schools have been entrusted with the task of charting out USPs for their schools and reach out to the people to find potential students, besides starting admissions for Classes to I to VI as early as April as against the usual month of June.

“Every year, we lose out on admission of many students just because we start late. This year we have decided to start the admission process as early as possible,” Director of Elementary Education, Devarajan, told Express.

“With the Common School System, there will be no difference between us and the other streams. Since we have better facilities and the curriculum is going to be the same, there are good number of chances that parents rush to us and we want to cash in on that”, Chief Educational Officer of Chennai Corporation Schools, Mohana Kumar, said.

Besides stressing the point that a school’s image rests with the HM, the teachers are also involved in the imagebuilding of the school, said Mohana Kumar. Quite recently the names of the Corporation schools was changed to Chennai schools and after that 1500 new admissions had been made with strudents moving from other streams in Chennai, he said.

Devarajan said they had already started distribution of pamphlets listing facilities in government schools like TV, laptops, free noon-meals, well-trained primary teachers and other infrastructural specialities. He further said that parents will be allowed to visit the schools and check out the facilities. One should not be surprised if advertisements for government and Corporation schools appear on TV and other media.

While the Chennai School HMs have been allocated separate funds for the advertisements, the Government School HMs have to carry out the task with only the funds available with the Parents Teachers Association.

Addressing a gathering of teachers during the Corporation schools renaming ceremony at Ripon Building here, the Mayor said, “Rs one lakh cash reward will be given to the parents teachers association (PTA) of those schools registering centum which in turn can be used for the infrastructure development in such schools.”

Elaborating the need for changing the name of Corporation schools to Chennai schools, Subramanian said, “The objective of renaming the Corporation school as Chennai Schools is to remove the psychological barriers among the public that the Corporation schools were not equivalent to private schools.”

Subramanian said that in just one week since the admissions began to schools run by the Chennai Corporation in April, over 1,500 students have enrolled in different classes.

After renaming 312 civic body schools as Chennai Schools, he insisted that the teachers working at these schools motivate the students for securing good marks. He also noted that 528 child labourers who were rescued last year would soon be enrolled into Chennai schools. Besides other officials, Corporation Commissioner Rajesh Lakhoni, Deputy Commissioner (Education) M Balaji and Deputy Mayor R Sathiyabama participated in the ceremony.