With the onset of nursery admissions in the national Capital, worried parents are seen running helter-skelter trying to get seats for their wards. Most schools have already started their admissions on December 20 and since each school has its own admission criteria, parents have to go from school-to-school to apply.
Parents also complained that many schools were flouting rules by screening parents, asking what their yearly income is, selling the prospectus at an exuberant price and also not agreeing to give refund in case a student drops out to take admission elsewhere.
Founder of admissions nursery.com Sumit Vohra said, “Parents are very distressed because first they have to run around from one school to another as the criteria in every school is different and then they have to sit through a screening procedure as well. Then many parents are even complaining that the websites are not working properly and schools are not being cooperative. This has got parents worried and they are now just trying to figure out what to do. Many schools are not even giving refund of fees, which means that if a child gets into the preferred school later on, parents will lose money as to be on the safe side they would’ve admitted their child elsewhere.”
On Monday, as Tagore International School opened its admissions for nursery online, several parents complained that the website was not working properly. Kritika Negi, a parent said, “I’m facing difficulty in filling the online form for Tagore International. After furnishing all the details in the form when we click ‘submit’ button it should provide us auto generated acknowledgement receipt with username and password, but no such prompt is coming. Instead it said, ‘This data already exists.’ I called up the school for assistance but no satisfactory answer was given by them and they say that since
everything is online, they won’t be able to guide us.”
However, principal of Tagore International said that the website was responding perfectly fine and people who faced problems must not have followed all the instructions. “We had received over 75 applications online from parents by noon on Monday and if the website was not working these applications would not have come in. A lot of parents have even downloaded the forms and come to the school and submitted them. The process is moving on smoothly and there is no problem at all,” clarified Sen.
Meanwhile, parents have been showing social media forums with negative comments about various schools and the admission process. One of the parents on an online forum said, “Schools are not playing by the rules — be it by the National Progressive Schools Conference (NPSC), Schools Action Committee or the Ganguly Committee. They are all screening parents and the DAV schools are even
giving points on the basis of students from sister schools, which could also mean playschools.”
However, while parents fret and fume over these issues, admissions are still underway and most schools are expected to end their admission process mid-January.