Nagapattinam panchayat school gets ISO certificate
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Sambath Kumar
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Nagapattinam:
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In December 2004, the
panchayat union middle school in Keechankuppam, a small fishing hamlet
in Nagapattinam, was ravaged by the tsunami. Thirteen years later, from
the verge of being shut down, the school has now received an ISO
certification that even private schools in the vicinity cannot boast of.
More than 80 lives were
lost in the tsunami from the school that is close to the sea.
Post-tsunami, the number of students came down to just 92 from 192 as
parents feared sending their children there.A decade later, the school
has 390 children and could have 450 in the next academic year.
The school today has everything that a private school offers in terms of infrastructure. The classrooms are WiFi-enabled and the school has science and computer labs.Apart from safe drinking water and toilet facilities, it also has a rooftop garden to teach gardening. “It was necessary to give a facelift and regain the confidence of the people attracted to private schools,“ said R Balu, who joined as headmaster in 2013.
“Since government schools can only enrol for Class I, I started taking kindergarten classes for children by appointing special teachers with the help of villagers,“ he said. And there was no looking back. The vil lage and various NGOs support the school financially , apart from former students.
“We were under the assumption that the school which lost 80 of its students would be in ruins. We were taken aback when we visited it recently ,“ said D Karthikeyan, director of Quest Certification Private Limited, an India-based certification body which recommended the school for ISO certification.
The school today has everything that a private school offers in terms of infrastructure. The classrooms are WiFi-enabled and the school has science and computer labs.Apart from safe drinking water and toilet facilities, it also has a rooftop garden to teach gardening. “It was necessary to give a facelift and regain the confidence of the people attracted to private schools,“ said R Balu, who joined as headmaster in 2013.
“Since government schools can only enrol for Class I, I started taking kindergarten classes for children by appointing special teachers with the help of villagers,“ he said. And there was no looking back. The vil lage and various NGOs support the school financially , apart from former students.
“We were under the assumption that the school which lost 80 of its students would be in ruins. We were taken aback when we visited it recently ,“ said D Karthikeyan, director of Quest Certification Private Limited, an India-based certification body which recommended the school for ISO certification.







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