Parents refuse to send children to school, State calls in psychiatrists

Another bereaved mother, Manjula, too has doubts if her eldest daughter would continue her education. ‘‘Should I lose another child?’’ she asks. Her son Jayaprakash died in the blaze.

But the State Government is keen on ensuring the siblings of the children who died do not drop out of school. It has brought in a team of psychologists and psychiatrists to counsel the parents of these children. Says District Collector J.Radhakrishnan, ‘‘The counsellors will visit all these parents and talk them into sending their surviving children to school.’’

All the parents are poor and illiterate and work as farm labourers. ‘‘Our objective is to ensure that none of these children drops out,’’ he says.

Meanwhile, the district administration began relocating the 720 survivors of the school fire to nine other schools in Kumbakonam. They would be given free textbooks and uniforms and no fee would be charged from them, the principals of the schools said.

The children who came for admission to the new schools narrated the horrors of the Friday fire. Eight-year-old B. Srinivasan’s class was on the ground floor, because he was in the English medium. But his teacher took him to the second-storey thatched shed because a team from School Education Department was scheduled to inspect the school to assess the enrolment. The government aid would depend on the number of students enrolled.

Last year, during a similar inspection, the teacher changed his name to ‘‘T. Vinod Kumar.’’ However, this time, his name was not changed. But he was nearly trapped in fire. However, he ran out the room the moment he noticed the fire.

The high school girl, A. Ilakiya, said the entrance gate was closed and the students broke it open with a wooden stool. ‘‘I want to put the horror behind and start preparing myself to go to the new school,’’ she says.

From tomorrow, it would be back to school, but to a new school, for most of the survivors of the Friday’s fire accident.