Students skip school and protest inside the Block Education Office in this Tamil Nadu town

As the new academic year began in Tamil Nadu and schools reopened on June 13, Monday, more than 75 students boycotted the first day of the school and staged a sit-in protest inside the Block Education Officer (BEO) in Alangulam, a town in Tenkasi district of Tamil Nadu. The students were brought to the office by their parents and they were demanding a separate government school in their Keezha Kuthapanchan village.

Afternoon meals were served to the protesting students in the BEO office. Subramanian, the Sankarankovil District Educational Officer, held a peace talk and dispersed the parents and children. He visited Keezha Kuthapanchan to check possibilities for a new school and called the villagers to the Chief Educational Office in Tenkasi for the next level of talks, as reported by ENS.

The gathered children and parents belonged to various schools located in the Alangulam town, along with the nearby Thalaiyuthu, Puthupatti and Mathapattinam villages. The demand for a new government school is quite old. It was five years ago that the Keezha Kuthapanchan-based Hindu parents stopped sending their wards to a government-aided primary school, located in their village itself, alleging that the teachers were preaching Christianity to their children instead of teaching.

Since then, they have been demanding a government school in their village. It has been reported by ENS that even after repeated visits to this village, the School Education Department officials refused to recommend a new school citing the existence of an aided school. One of the protesting parents, Arumugam, said that around 165 students from his village will not go to school until an announcement for the construction of a new school is made. "To fight the conversion efforts taken by the teachers of the aided school, we sent our children outside our village to study. However, they are feeling unsafe in the nearby villages," he added.