The Indian Express (Delhi Edition)
As Delhi grapples with admission chaos, Gurgaon parents say they’ve faced it too
SCHOOLS ISSUE SEPARATE DATES AND CRITERIA
WHILE NURSERY admissions in Delhi schools are still underway, most Gurgaon schools completed their admission processes in August and September.
Explaining the rationale for the early admission, Aditi Misra, principal of Delhi Public School, Sector 45, said, “The months that follow are busy with annual days and festivities, so it’s good to have the admission out of the way. Parents’ anxiety is also put to rest.”
But in the absence of any kind of regulation of nursery admissions in private schools, parents in Gurgaon complain that the process is confusing and chaotic, with each institution having a different eligibility criteria, procedure, and dates for applications and announcements.
While some institutions, like Shikshantar School and Shiv Nadar School, draw lots to determine which students will be accepted, others, like The Shri Ram School and The Heritage School, use a point-based system, giving consideration to factors such as the distance of the child’s home from the school and whether they have siblings already enrolled in the school. Others, such as Scottish High and Ridge Valley, have one-to-one interactions with students and parents to make a decision. In such a scenario, parents say they have no option but to begin preparing for admission season months in advance.
Sonia Kaushik, who recently enrolled her daughter in a prominent school in the city, began weighing her options a year ago. She says one major issue is a lack of synchronisation in timelines of different schools. “We filled applications for my daughter in four schools, but our preference was DPS, which is close to our home,” she says.
Kaushik does not disclose the name of the school her daughter eventually joined, but adds, “The results of one of the other schools were released a week before DPS, and our daughter was accepted there. We only had a few days to pay the advance at that school to secure a place for her, and we did not want to risk her not getting in to the other schools, so we ended up enrolling her there.”
A week later, Kaushik’s daughter was accepted into DPS. “We had already paid a non-refundable deposit of Rs 80,000 at the other school, so we couldn’t make her switch,” she says.
Gurgaon resident Dhruv Vir Singh, whose daughter will be attending Kunskapsskolan School, also stressed on the lack of coordination between schools. “The biggest problem we faced was that the admission process for schoolsisspreadatdifferentdates,”sayssingh.
He adds, “No parent would want to let go of one school and risk going to another school. So parents usually lock schools by paying admission fees and claim a refund if they get through a better school later. But this means parents lose around Rs 20,00040,000 as processing fees.”
Large deposits demanded by schools, which could be anywhere between Rs 30,000-80,000, is another cause of concern among parents. Abhishek Sharma, a resident of Sector 90, whose son will join Shikshantar School, says that “admissions in August, for a session that begins in April, make no sense”.
No solution appears to be in sight, with the District Elementary Education Officer (DEEO) admitting that no plans for regulation are in place as of now. “Each school has its own admission process and deadlines. As of now, there is no plan to regulate admissions, but this decision has to also come from the state,” says DEEO Ram Kumar Phalswal.
In such a situation, parents often turn to social media for support to manoeuvre the complex admission process. Facebook groups such as ‘Gurgaon Moms’ and ‘Gurgaon Admission’ were flooded with posts from parents, seeking advice from each other.