No play for kids at school that shares space with court

Dipti Sonawala

     

Posted On Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 02:09:46 AM

It is a school where students are not allowed to play in the campus, organise cultural programmes, raise their voices even during recess or, when the bell rings at the end of the day, rush out noisily to meet their parents outside. But the kids can derive evil pleasure from the fact that, every time they break these rules, it is their teachers and the school headmistress who get punished and are dragged to court. Dadar’s Shinde Wadi BMC school, which was set up in 1975, has shared its premises with a magistrate’s court since 1985, which primarily hears matters related to offences under the BMC Act. The school with its primary and secondary sections, a night school and a NGO-run section functions out of three floors, while two halls on the ground floor are exclusively for the court. The fallout of this arrangement is that teachers at Shinde Wadi have to keep more than 800 rambunctious students on a tight leash all the time. Since the court functions from 9 am to 5 pm, teachers have to ensure students don’t disturb the legal fraternity downstairs. Every time students get noisy in Dadar’s Shinde Wadi BMC School, their teachers get a rap as the school shares premises with a magistrate’s court The penalty for breaking this code of conduct is severe. Teachers and the headmistress are summoned by the magistrates and held guilty under contempt of court and made to remain in the court room for five hours. Says a teacher, “It is very difficult to keep the students suppressed all the time. Being kids, they are naturally exuberant, noisy and energetic. How long can we keep them engaged with class work?” Every time there is even the slightest hint of a commotion, a constable is despatched to identify the errant group and the teacher responsible for managing it. Recently a teacher had to put in the punitive hours in the court when her students ran down the stairs noisily.  Headmistress Aparna Save is finding it tough to manage the situation. “I don’t want to comment on the court’s functioning,” she says warily, adding, “It is sad that we cannot organise any programmes during school hours, or allow the children to get into any physical activity.” Abbasaheb Jadhav, BMC’s education officer, said, “It is possible that the education officers at that time had thought of something before allowing a court to run in a school building. ” He said students were not being inconvenienced at all and could always use the BMC playground behind the school. He claimed he had not received any complaint from the teaching staff. “We have not heard of any teacher being punished and would not like to comment,” he said.