School ‘humiliates’ students for late fee

Management insists nothing wrong in sending message to parents.

KARACHI:

Ten-year-old Shafaq Siddiqui was among those 18 students who were told to leave their classrooms in the middle of a test and asked to stand at the school’s reception on Monday - all because the management believed their parents did not pay the fee.

Encountering mocking glances and sneers of classmates during the school’s grade five mathematics class, Shafaq was ‘humiliatingly punished’ in this manner by The American Foundation School, her father, Shoukat Siddiqui, told The Express Tribune.

The school, having multiple campuses located in Gulishtan-e-Jauhar, was established in the year 1997 and registered with University of Cambridge, as well as, the Sindh education department’s directorate of private schools. While several parents dismiss such punishments as long as there was no physical abuse, Shoukat - whose two other children are also studying in the same school - has decided to take action against what he called is a shameful practice.

“We were made to stand under the sun as punishment for a long time,” Shafaq recalled. “Sir Rizwan [an accounts section official] told us we will be suspended from school if our parents failed to pay the fee.” This is a routine practice at the school. “Whenever they ask students to come to the reception, all other students already know the summoned ones have not paid their fee so they make fun of them later.”

When Shafaq returned home that day, she immediately called her father at work. “For a long time, she could not say anything except cry uncontrollably,” he said. “Then she blamed me for all the humiliation that she had faced.” Shoukat found it hard to believe the school would react that way. “Do they want to give this message to the children that their parents are defaulters of the school and unable to bear their educational expenses?”

Shafaq was punished because her fee for June and July was apparently not paid. Shoukat clarified, however, that he paid the fee for June and then collected the challan of the remaining months’ fee when the school reopened after the summer vacations. The school allowed parents to submit fees by September 5, he said.

The school management denied, however, that such an incident took place. Later, school owner Asad Hussain Mirza accepted the children were sent to the reception but only to convey the message that their parents were ‘defaulters of the school’ and if they had submitted the fee then the receipt was not updated in the school records.

“The entire process hardly takes three to four minutes and is not done as a punishment,” said Mirza. “Sending a message to parents through kids is our motto,” he added.

“When students return to their classrooms, they discuss the instance with each other, which helps disseminate the school’s message and administer discipline in our affairs,” Mirza explained.

Such psychological abuses are a “major flaw” in administering the affairs of schools, said Society for the Protection of the Rights of Child provincial manager Nazra Jahan. “How can one disregard the psychologically negative impact of directing students to leave their classrooms only because their parents have failed to pay the fee,” she said. “A punishment is a punishment, whether it is corporal or not. If our schools wish to convey their messages in this manner then this indeed is a very negative message.”

Unfortunately, the trend of humiliating students when parents are unable to pay school fees is not restricted to a few schools. R*, once a ninth grade student at a school, having campuses in PECHS and Defence Housing Authority areas, admitted that she wanted to take away her life after facing public humiliation when her parents failed to pay her school fees.

“After my name was called out in the assembly by the school’s vice principal, I wished that the earth would open up and swallow me,” she recalled. “All around I saw children snickering and making fun of us.”

Even in her school, the principal would regularly call out the names of children whose parents failed to pay on time in front of the whole assembly.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 4^th, 2013.