The Indian Express   14.08.2012

Municipal schools to maintain students’ profile

Faced with tough competition from private schools, the Ahmedabad Municipal School Board has decided to profile each enrolled student and maintain a detailed record of their performance in previous years.

The board believes that regular monitoring and easy accessibility to these student profiles will help it control the “declining” enrollment numbers in municipal schools.

“After deliberations, it was felt that we need to identify those factors that are responsible for fewer children coming to our schools. Students’ performance, their personal and as well as academic background and current status would play a key role in tracking down various decision making patterns,” said AMC board chairman Jagdish Bhavsar.

Each student will have a separate profile of his own with his photograph on the file that will be displayed at a corner in the classroom. These would be regularly updated with various assessments and activities conducted in the classroom as well taken as a part of home assignments. The board agreed that this would ill increase the workload of teachers but once it is maintained, it will be a lot more beneficial for them.

It is said this will not only benefit teachers to keep a track of students’ performance but also assist various inspection teams or cluster resource persons to ascertain and evaluate the overall classroom performance just at a glance. “It will help experts to guide and motivate teachers to pay more attention on weak performers,” Bhavsar said.

Against the target of 30,000 enrollments in the entry class, the board could enroll only 16,562 students in 464 schools. Previous year, the figure was 27,344.Not only the students’ strength has dwindled in the past few years, but also the number of municipal schools has come down to 464 from 541 in 2011-12.The board has also recently proposed to monitor the performance of more than 4,000 teachers.