107-year old Chennai school gets unique gifts from old students

Namakkal: A poor farm labourer hobbled to his 107-year-old panchayat elementary school at R.Pudupatti near Rasipuram and offered five notebooks to the school principal. Tears welled up in the eyes of the teachers and students. For, it was the poverty-stricken farm worker’s way of saying “Thank you” to the alma mater.

“I could give only this to the school,” he said. Old students of school came in a procession with an offering of 30 kinds of gifts to celebrate a unique “school festival”. From plastic pots in bright hues to new buckets, mugs, boxes of pencils and pens and fans were presented to their school. “Every year, we contribute whatever we can. This time, we decided to take out a procession to offer gifts like the bride’s family would offer during the wedding. This is our unique way of urging the government to upgrade the elementary school to a high school,” said an old student, D. Vinodh.

The century-old school has about 141 students now. The Sarva Siksha Abiyan conducted a three-day training programme for upgrading the school. “The old students support the school in many ways. However, in a unique attempt to create awareness on the need to improve the quality of education on par with the private schools and to increase the enrollment of students in the school, the old students came in a procession with bridal gifts (seeru in Tamil),” said the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan block resource educator, P. Mangani. The chief education officer of Namakkal district, Gopidas too participated in the school festival.

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