Our children have fully settled at St. Thomas Academy on St. Thomas Mount in Chennai, India. I and Shubhra had visited the school in the third week of May after checking through some of the well known city schools. Some of them said that they did not have place. One fo them wanted the children to be brought down to Chennai to take a test, after which they would approve or disapprove based on their performance in the test. A professor friend suggested us to go to another school. The school said that they are happy to support parents who are on transfer. And they said that the annual fee would be just 28,000 rupees. We were happy. And we were asked to meet a teacher. She called us aside to say that the 28k was the annual fee. But we have to give 200,000 rupees per child donation to the school. We were dumbfounded. We left the school considering that 400,000 would be way high for us. As we were perturbed by the situation, another friend called and asked me to speak to the Provincial of the OMI province in India - Fr. Chinnappan. He was very soft spoken, and he immediately called couple of schools and told them to consider our request. The first one, though we were very happy, since our children do not know Tamil at all, and that the school environment would have required some amount of Tamil, we opted out for the second one - St. Thomas Academy.
When we visited, it was still 10 days to the restart of the school. The school looked a bit dry with no trees around. We were very concerned if the children would really appreciate the school. We met the school Correspondent and spoke with the Principal over phone. After that we were taken on a small tour around the classrooms by Ms. Priyanka, the one at the front-desk. We decided on the school. The school administration was considerate to give some concession too, as we were willing to pay for the whole year upfront for both the children. And the academic year began on 7 June 2019.
Though it had been scheduled to start on 3 June, due to water scarcity in Chennai and the heatwave, the government had asked all schools to start on a later date. The beginning of the children at the school began with great appreciation from our daughter as she was so happy at the way the teachers took care of her and the pedagogical methods - for her age. (Will write about it more later).
Shubhra joined the school in end of October as a Wellness Teacher (part time). On 7 Dec, the school had an inspection. I thought of sharing a short video on the event which was released by the school by the evening of 7th itself to give some understanding about the school.
When we visited, it was still 10 days to the restart of the school. The school looked a bit dry with no trees around. We were very concerned if the children would really appreciate the school. We met the school Correspondent and spoke with the Principal over phone. After that we were taken on a small tour around the classrooms by Ms. Priyanka, the one at the front-desk. We decided on the school. The school administration was considerate to give some concession too, as we were willing to pay for the whole year upfront for both the children. And the academic year began on 7 June 2019.
Though it had been scheduled to start on 3 June, due to water scarcity in Chennai and the heatwave, the government had asked all schools to start on a later date. The beginning of the children at the school began with great appreciation from our daughter as she was so happy at the way the teachers took care of her and the pedagogical methods - for her age. (Will write about it more later).
Shubhra joined the school in end of October as a Wellness Teacher (part time). On 7 Dec, the school had an inspection. I thought of sharing a short video on the event which was released by the school by the evening of 7th itself to give some understanding about the school.
