BENGALURU: The newly restored Fort High School building, a 115-year-old heritage structure, will finally be handed over by the restoration organisation — the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) — to the Education Department on Saturday. Fort High, located in Chamarajpet, Bengaluru, is known to be the first school in Karnataka, and was built in phases starting 1903 by the Mysore Wadiyars.
The school, which was originally an anglo-vernacular school with multiple first languages being taught when it started, still teaches seven first languages — Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, English, Hindi, Sanskrit, Urdu, S C Chandrashekar, former principal, said.
With spacious classrooms, Fort High started as a boys only high school (Classes 8 to 10), with a strength of 2,000 students. The previous year, it catered to 210 students from Classes 1 to 10. The school is a Karnataka Public School and has been teaching in English for a few years, he added.During the restoration, the students were shifted to one side of the school to ensure continuity of education.
INTACH will hand over the school to the department in a grand manner with an evening of classical musical concert, and in the presence of the Primary and Secondary Education Minister S Suresh Kumar. “The building, we understood during the restoration, is a good architectural study about how to add on to an existing structure — we learnt that the building was built in phases, with different architectural plans,” said Pankaj Modi, technical coordinator, INTACH, who headed the project.