The 100-year history of six schools in a petta - Asha Sridhar

The old and new premises of the Alamelu Manga Thayarammal Montessori School

  

The corridors of the six schools managed by the Chintadripet Secondary School Association, which celebrated its centenary recently, are populated not just with a list of alumni and history that can be traced back to 1845, but also anecdotes narrated by its former teachers and students.

Some of the schools, all located in Chintadripet, pre-date the formation of the Association. The first school, Chintadripet High School, was started by Kesavalu Naidu in 1845. Before being handed over to the Association in 1913, the schools were started and managed by various educationists and philanthropists, according to C. S. Rajavelan, president of the Association.

An alumnus of the Montessori, primary and the Chintadripet High School, Mr. Rajavelan said the Association was formed in 1913 by C.P. Ramaswamy Iyer. The oldest of the six schools, now called Chintadripet Higher Secondary School, is 169 years old.

In an article written almost two decades ago, retired IAS officer J.A. Ambasankar, who was an alumnus of the school, chronicles how the single teacher-manager and founder Kesavala Naidu started the first of the schools without any government aid and ran it for nearly forty years.

Writing about Chintadripet High School, he says that since the school was fulfilling the need of the locality, applicants could not be turned away because of space constraints. By this time, the school came under the Association’s wings and was housed in two rented buildings. Thatched buildings had to be put up to meet the demand, he writes.

The other schools managed by the Association are Chintadripet Kalyanam Higher Secondary School for Girls, Chintadripet Middle School, RBCCC Middle School, Dhanakoti Middle School and Alamelu Manga Thayarammal Montessori School.

One president of the Association who members fondly recall is T.P. Meenakshi Sundaranar. “He was instrumental in acquiring the site where Chintadripet Higher Secondary School is presently located,” said Mr. Rajavelan.

A separate school for girls was started with Rs. 20,000 given by philanthropist Kalyanasundaram Chettiar. Named after him, the Chintadripet Kalyanam Girls High School was upgraded into a higher secondary school in 1978.

Eighty-year-old V. Lakshmi, who retired from service in 1991 after teaching history and English at the girls’ school, recalled how she had gone and spoken to a girl’s parents to convince them to let her pursue her education. “Today, she is a doctor,” she recalled.

 

Courtesy & Source:http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-tamilnadu/the-100year-history-of-six-schools-in-a-petta/article5958613.ece