CHENNAI: The Chennai Corporation has formed special teams of teachers led by the headmaster or headmistress in all its 281 schools to identify dropouts from LKG to Class 12 and take necessary measures to boost school admissions for the upcoming academic year.
Corporation Commissioner G Prakash said each school will have a team of teachers headed by the HM and each teacher will have to cover at least 50 families and find out why the children dropped out.
"The teachers must record the reasons and basic details of the children and family and submit it to the HMs. After this, the HMs will have to take measures to admit the children back to schools,'' the Commissioner said.
Prakash said that each teacher can seek the help of self-help group members in their localities to identify families. "This is a citywide effort by the corporation to boost school admissions with special focus on dropouts by reaching out streetwise,'' he said.
According to data, about 83,000 students are enrolled in Chennai Corporation schools. Among them, in the academic year 2019-20, officials say that at least 300 students from various classes have dropped out.
"Evictions were a major reason many students did not come back to schools. Now, there's a concern that the lockdown could lead to more people staying away from schools as not all students attend online classes,'' an official with the civic body's education department said.
Such measures to identify dropouts had gone in vain last time as teachers were not able to locate the houses of missing students due to relocation. "We are hopeful of adding more students this year,'' the official said.
Meanwhile, the civic body had earlier distributed free smartphones with data connections to higher secondary students for online classes.
Despite the dropouts, a whopping 95.30 percent students from Corporation schools, who attended the plus 1 board examination, had cleared it this year. This is 1.78 percent higher than the previous year.
Of the 1,911 boys and 2,984 girls from the 2019-20 batch who attended the exams in the city, 1,777 boys and 2,888 girls passed.
Corporation high schools at Nesapakkam, Lloyds Road, Alwarpet and CIT Nagar recorded a pass percentage of 100.