Hyderabad, July 06: Even as the Fee Regulatory Committee, which was set up in order to curb the exorbitant fee hikes in private schools, has suggested in its report that the increased tuition fee collected at the time of admission from the parents would be adjusted for the next term, parents smell a rat.
Private unaided schools
in the city have recently increased the fees citing the Sixth Pay Commission’s recommendations and claim that they needed to hike the fees to pay enhanced salaries and clear the arrears to their staff. But the the fact was that much before the Fee Regulatory Committee gave its report, many schools had already collected higher fee. And the parents are now in a catch 22 situation.
Most of the parents say that the school managements have collected the fee and have not given a proper receipt, which made the entire payment unaccounted for, as there are no records for the paid fee.
“When my son joined an international school, they asked me to pay Rs 16,000 as development fee and in the receipt they mentioned it as 16 books. There is no way that anyone would understand that I had already paid the amount except the school management and myself and there is no proof of the amount spent,’’ an aggrieved parent, Pratip Das Gupta, said. He hoped that the Fee Regulatory Committee formulated some apparatus to curb this kind of unaccounted money. “This is also becoming like land registration. One pays huge amount of money in reality while very less amount of money is shown on paper,’’ he added.
In some schools, more shockingly, parents would get receipt of only first-term fees and the rest of the fee for different terms and additional facilities would go unaccounted for. At a CBSE school in Secunderabad, students promoted to Second Standard were asked to pay Rs 15,000 in addition to the first term fee which is nearly Rs 8,000. But the parents were given a receipt only for the first-term fee.
“When we asked the school management, they told us that it was for extra-curricular activities. The very next day, to my shock, I was asked again to pay Rs 1,500 for my son’s sports uniform,’’said an angry parent and employee of GE Capital.
Meanwhile, reacting to the Fee Regulatory Committee’s report, many school managements think it is virtually impossible to run a school adhering to the proposed guidelines.
“We have to pay for electricity, printing and so many miscellaneous things. Is the government giving us money for all this? No. How do we run a school?” asks the principal of a private school, justifying that the school’s fee structure justifies the quality education they offer.
With parents finding it difficult to cope with the pressure of soaring school fees, they wish to present the issue of receipt and other issues under the banner of Hyderabad Parents Association to the Fee Regulatory Committee and the State Government on Monday.
–Agencies–