Friday, April 28, 2023

Free school

I have not been able to find out who exactly TP Ramasamy Pillai was, but he seems to have been quite generous to the cause of education. He must have lived on General Collins Road, for there is a house on the road with his name on the gatepost. The house itself is set back from the road, and the large gates open into a driveway up to the house. Rather foreboding, it seemed to me.

The gates of this building are nothing like that; these are smaller, and much more inviting, the way a school ought to be. These are the gates to the Sree Thiruvoteeswarar Free High School, which is run by a Trust of the same name. That Trust was endowed by Ramasamy Pillai. and the school provides fee education to a rather limited number of students. Going by some of the websites aggregating such information, the school has anything from 15 to 37 students enrolled in classes 6 to 12. Those sites also say that the number of teachers range from 2 to 6. That no doubt gives the school a fairly decent teacher:pupil ratio, but with only two (or three) classrooms in the school, how would they accommodate so many grades?

Be that as it may, one hopes that the school, supposedly established in 1947, is able to hold its own in the years ahead!


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