HYDERABAD: Who said gen-y has ‘chalta hai’ attitude? Who said they can’t handle more than one kid? Who said school management folks looks geeky and boring? Neethika Brahmadi, 23, stepped into her parents school as head of business development and to give her touch to the school and the curriculum.
After graduating from Symbiosis Pune in PR stream, Neethika came back to carry the legacy of her parents Mahesh Reddy, chairman and Sunitha Rani, director of Foster Billabong High International School. She floated her venture called ‘Foster Apt Management’ that deals with education modules and more. “I started off by handling the admin, admissions, advertising, PR, crisis-management as the business development head. Eventually, I started to take care of academic operations of pre-school and primary, where mostly I try finding loopholes and tie-up loose-ends to be worked on. We started venturing into creating Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for the school,” she says.
“Often there is no connection between the admin and the academic department. For example, a child skipped the school bus and is later dropped by the parent. The front office rings up the class teacher to inform that the kid has arrived and also there is record by the CCTV camera at the gate. One department that is not in sync is the transport department. While going back, they don’t know that the kid is in the school and they have to take the route to drop the child back. SOP comes in rescue to avoid such glitches. It takes care of the safety of the child and also the efficiency of the admin department,” she shares.
She then realised that not all schools follow SOPs. That’s when she floated with her venture Foster Apt Management. “Running a school became a cakewalk to me,” Neethika, fondly called as Nikki, beams. “I realised that there are many things, where we could put our hand into. I started off with educational management consultancy as module one, which segregates into four branches of modules,” she informs with passion reflecting in her words.
Speaking elaborately about the modules, she says, “The first is ‘Working Management Equity,’ which is about an investor who wants to run a school as a project. We will take care of management. They can either lease out their management to us or take us in a revenue sharing basis or a percentage of the project cost. If it is percentage sharing, we guide them and manage their project for an year and give it to them. If it is a CBSE international school, there are certain parameters like pre-Olympiad football ground, fire exit and many more. There are prerequisites we don’t know until we go for affiliation. We also revive the existing school. May be, they have good operation but deficiency at the admission front, we help them reach the admission target,” informs Neethika, who draws inspiration from her mom, who is married to education.
The school also has two seats in each section of 20 students allocated for special students . “We take mild dyslexic and ADHD students and a special aid team takes care of them. While working with them, I realised that in both the Telugu states, there are no special agencies that will guide the parents on where to go about. There are institutes like NINMH, dyslexic school but they cater to one particular problem. I want to create an agency where any parent can log in, or contact us for a shadow teacher. They can come up with doubts like “My child is dyslexic. He can do this, but he can’t do this. What do we do? Which school can he get into? How, what test does he have to take. We will act like consultancy to special aid, which is new concept,” she explains.
She also talks about another module called Vocaboom. “It is split into three trimesters and every session runs for 60 minutes. We tweak it according to school. Instead of kid saying, ‘mom, I am angry on u,’ they will be taught to say ‘mom, I am irked with you.’ Our major target is towns more than cities. We are trying to translate English into the existing mother tongue of the particular state so that they comprehend better,” she notifies.