Parents on bus duty: Facing flak, Chandigarh school puts order on hold citing founder’s week celebrations

Vivek High School in Chandigarh. Express

AFTER DRAWING flak from the Chandigarh Parents Association (CPA), Vivek High School, Sector 38, on Monday put the order of asking parents to do bus duty on hold.

While specifying that the school has founder’s week celebrations, the authorities also said that many parents had expressed their inability to cooperate with the school.  “Since the students will be following different time schedules for founder’s week practice and bus timings will vary, we will relook at this endeavour after founder’s week celebrations. We solicit your cooperation for all our endeavours at school so as to give our students the best experience during their formative years at school. Many parents have expressed their inability to cooperate on this endeavour of the school due to various personal reasons. In order to make it feasible, parents, who are willing to help and volunteer, will have to extend for more than 5-6 duties,” stated fresh orders.

Chairman of Vivek High School, H S Mamik, told Chandigarh Newsline, that the orders have not been revoked but deferred for four weeks. “It is just because of the founder’s week celebrations that the directions would be in place from next month. These are the directions of CBSE, too, and we will be following it,” he said.

“Forcing parents to do bus duty was a foolish idea. When we complained, the school management tried to defend their decision saying the parents are happy with it and no one is opposing, while they were actually trying to escape from their responsibility of ensuring children’s safety,” said CPA president Nitin Goyal.

A few days ago, CPA had submitted a complaint to the UT Education Secretary, requesting him to direct the school authorities to withdraw the orders. The parents said that if the orders were followed, in future, the school would like to outsource other duties to parents, too, like guarding washrooms on roster basis or attend classes with children. CPA added that such weird ideas would increase parents’ woes as they also have their own work to do. The parents had demanded that the school should share the CCTV feed of the school buses online so that they could keep a check.

What the orders say?

Vivek High School sent a circular to parents asking either of them to ride the school bus his or her child is using, during the morning and return trips. The orders were to be implemented from October 3. “Either of the parents of the child using the particular bus will ride that bus for morning trip and for return. Keeping the current strength of students using buses in view, each parent will get a turn 5/6 times a year,” stated the directions. Roster regarding the duties of parents would be released soon. If a parent is not able to do his or her bus duty on a particular day, he would have to exchange it with other parents and inform the school two days in advance. Only the father or mother would be permitted to do the bus duty and no guardian or household help would be allowed to fill in for parent’s duty.