Parents feel deadline heat

Some schools are selling forms only for a week, most schools shut gates after 12 noon. Mallica Joshi reports.

Kavita Menon, 31, had planned to buy at least three nursery admission forms on Tuesday but couldn’t get even one. “The queue outside the school was very long. Despite standing in line for over two hours, I couldn’t get the form. The forms are available only for a very short period,” said Menon, who stood in line outside Springdales Pusa Road.

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It is not only Menon who is facing such problem. The short window time to buy forms has other parents in knots as well. Most schools are selling forms only till 12 noon while in some schools, forms are on sale only for a week’s time.

“This is like a pressure test. As it is there is a lot of pressure on us and this time frame makes it really tough to fill forms and send them on time,” said Krishna Arora, a resident of Mayapuri, who is planning to fill forms of 15 schools.

While Springdales is selling forms only till January 9, Frank Anthony Public School is selling them till January 6. Both schools will accept forms till January 16. While the guidelines say that forms will be sold and received between January 2 and January 16 this year, no direction about how sale and submission will be done has been made.

Many schools had decided to limit the number of days for form sale last year as well but a circular from the Directorate of Education (DoE) asked schools to extend the dates for sale as well as submission.

“Schools should sell forms till the last date as it is a matter of convenience for parents. The directorate should come out with very clear guidelines to avoid this confusion,” said Sumit Vohra, founder, admissionsnursery.com, a website for parents that has 40,000 members.

Online complaint

The DoE’s online complaint registration system stopped working on the second day of sale of forms as scores of parents tried to register complaints against erring schools. DoE officials, meanwhile, said that the system had crashed due to heavy traffic and would be up soon.