TIRUCHY: School managements welcomed the Madras High Court order allowing them to collect 75 per cent of fee for the 2020-21 academic year.
Tamil Nadu Nursery Primary Matriculation and CBSE schools association President Chandrasekaran said, "The order comes as a relief for us. Other schools could barely manage without any income. Loan after loan, managements could not avail any more to keep their teachers with the institutes. In this situatino the order comes at the right time."
Some parents, however, opined they could not pay fees as their income was hit badly.
S Muthuraj, father of two children in a private school, said, "We paid the fee already. However, in retrospect I thought I shouldn't have paid when the government asked institutions not to collect fee. My work is badly hit in the pandemic and we hardly get by." He runs a small grain mill in the city.
Chandrasekaran had a different view, "Only a handful of very popular schools in Tiruchy received fee payments from parents, say less than ten schools at maximum. Even now all parents cannot or will not pay up, but at least we can ask without hesitation from those who can. The order does gives us a moral support in that way."
He added, "While schools are allowed to collect fee, it is not sure if the government would compensate schools for RTE seats." According to RTE, every private school should allot 25 per cent of seats to poor students whose fee would be borne by the government. Chandrasekar said that nearly two years' RTE fee was pending and asked for sooner dispersal of the same.