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.