Students allege abuse by teacher

Coimbatore: A group of students from the Kandhasamy Nagar Government Primary School in Saravanampatti panchayat and their parents on Monday met the collector with a complaint that the children were being physically and verbally abused by a teacher.
Their petition said the teacher often made the students clean toilets in the school, pluck out weeds and thorny bushes from its backyard and sweep the premises.
The parents said repeated meetings and warnings to the teacher yielded no result.
The students and parents are residents of S P Kandhasamy Nagar. The primary school has around 50 students, most of them belonging to the scheduled castes, and two teachers.
“The students were repeatedly abused by Jayanthi, one of the teachers,” L Baby, a parent, said.
About 10 students and their parents met the collector and urged him to either change the teacher or ensure that such abusive behaviour stopped.
One of the students, who is being brought up by his grandmother and aunt after his father died and mother abandoned him, said he was made to clean toilets in the school for two years. “The teacher would allow me to attend classes only for one to one and half hours in a day. The rest of the time I would be made to clean toilets in the anganwadi on the campus and the school,” he said. He has now been shifted to another school for Class 6. “His teacher tortured him as there was no one to fight for him,” his aunt said.
The girls in the group showed bruises caused by beatings from the teacher for minor misdemeanours. “Last week, a few boys were playing by throwing erasers at one another. She assumed that I too was playing and thrashed me for 10 full minutes. My hands were swollen, and I could not lift them,” a girl student said.
“Once when I vomited after lunch, she hit me and verbally abused me,” she added.
Many younger children said they have been made to remove weeds, many of them thorny, from the school’s backyard under the sun for more than an hour a day.
The district chief education officer said he had sent an education officer to the school to inspect it, speak to other students and the teacher. “They have done an investigation. Once I receive the report, we will decide on how to act,” he said.