Kolkata: Tegharia Shikshayatan High School, a govt-aided school in the VIP area, started functioning as a co-educational English-medium school on Saturday. The ‘new’ school was officially inaugurated in the presence of state education minister Bratya Basu.The school is set to begin its admission process on Monday, with a target to fill 40 seats in one section. Barun Paul, the headmaster who took charge in 2018, said, “We already started receiving queries from parents who want to admit their wards here. My target was to run the school with dignity, and for that reason I started working on it and communicated with the local MLA and councillor, who helped me a lot in this regard. The school education department permitted us to take admissions from Class VI.”The school was founded in 1948, a year after Independence. The land was donated by two local residents as there was no school in the area at that time.The 75-year-old Bengali medium school faced its biggest challenge during the pandemic when student strength dwindled to only 100. Paul made efforts to start an English-medium wing, which became a reality recently after the school education department passed the order.From this academic session starting in Jan, the school converted the Bengali-medium wing into a co-educational one, and while keeping that wing intact, the co-educational English-medium wing was set to run simultaneously. “As the headmaster of this school, I want to provide quality education to students at a cheaper rate, which we can start shortly. Parents now want to admit their children to English-medium schools, but the huge fee structure of these schools makes it difficult for people from low-income groups. Our aim is to fulfil their dream of seeing their children study in an English-medium school, where they will also learn Bengali with equal importance,” Paul said.The school had 10 full-time teachers who were set to teach in the English-medium wing as well, and the school authorities were assured by the education dept that they would get teachers for the English-medium section very soon.There were over 500 state board-affiliated English-medium schools, and the number was increasing every year. A school education dept official said, “We have all the infrastructure to start English-medium wings, and we are granting approval in a phased manner every year before the new academic session starts in Jan. We are hopeful that through this effort, the student strength of state schools will increase within a short period.“
