COIMBATORE: The demands of students to revive the suggestion/complaint box scheme has finally met with success as all government high and higher secondary schools have been instructed to place the boxes without fail on their premises
The Tamil Nadu School Education Department introduced a scheme in 2012 instructing all government high and higher secondary schools to place suggestion/complaint boxes on the school premises in a location accessible to all students.
The students were allowed to drop their feedback on teachers’ performance, complaint letters on problems faced by them, particularly sexual abuse and corporal punishment, without mentioning their names. The government also listed a set of rules to handle these complaints. A few rules, including mandatory registration of all letters being dropped inside the box, inclusion of anonymous complaints, setting up a local school level committee headed by the respective Headmasters and taking appropriate action against these complaints every now and then. These rules were followed and the scheme was in place for a short period of time.
At present in many schools the boxes have vanished and even in those institutions where the scheme is live, the boxes are in a remote corner. Education officials, who earlier inspected the boxes, now don’t seem to be keen on the status of the scheme.
Responding to this a government school teacher said that they have been instructed to complete the portions before December and do not have enough time to respond to all the complaints dropped in the boxes.
A government school student told Express that the scheme helped them file complaints like excessive homework being imposed on us, teachers comparing performance of students and these were taken seriously and redressed immediately.