Optimizing Online Schooling [Part 4/5] Understanding the pain of school managements.

Last year, as soon as the lockdown started and it became clear that schools will have to deliver online education to their students, parents started to protest against paying full school fees. There were posts and videos on social media against schools that encouraged the parents to be more aggressive. The print and electronic media gave maximum coverage to the protesting parents and political leaders, as always, were quick to support them to gain mileage.

 There were two main arguments that parents had against schools, which were:

1) Their children were not attending physical schools and not getting access to various facilities like playground, laboratories etc. Hence, schools should not charge the entire year’s annual fees.

2) The school was not incurring many overhead costs (like electricity bills and stationary usage etc.) and hence these savings should be passed on to the parents by way of deduction in fees.

While the first argument of parents is quite understandable, the second argument always remains debatable. Because while some overhead costs were not incurred, there were new expenses that schools had to invest in like investment in broadband internet connectivity, IT software for online classes and extra hygiene for the safety of teachers and staff.

The Government passed orders restricting schools from collecting full school fees and accordingly all schools reduced their fees by 30% to 40%. The story takes an ugly turn after this.

Even after schools reduced their fees as per Government instructions, the fees did not start to come in for most schools. Set aside the current year’s school fees, schools were not getting even the outstanding fees of the previous academic year (the schools were mostly closed in March 2020 and many schools had a lot of outstanding fees to come at that time).

Collections for most schools were as less as 20% to 40% of the reduced fee structures. The first thing that school managements did was to cut down on their biggest expense head which is the salaries of teachers. Almost every school reduced the salaries of their teachers by about 50% as we have discussed in the previous post.

The situation I believe was manageable for schools that had been there for many years and had a healthy financial backup (savings). But most of the new schools which have come up recently have either taken huge loans for building the school or have taken the school premises or rent. For these schools, the loan EMI or monthly rent is the biggest recurring expense which they meet through the school fees collection. Most schools have not been able to pay their loan EMIs or rents since last year as the fee collections are not enough to meet these expenses even after paying half salaries to teachers. The banks are in no mood to give a moratorium on these loans unlike the benefit other MSMEs and Industries have got during the pandemic nor are the landlords or lessors ready to forgo the rents for the pandemic period. This has put the school managements of new schools into a very delicate condition. For some new upcoming schools, it will become difficult to survive if the same situation is repeated this year.

The condition of budget schools is more precarious. Most of the students of these budget schools come from middle- and lower-income families who are very sensitive to economic conditions. Many schools that have students from migrant families (coming from UP, Bihar, West Bengal) have seen a dramatic fall in their enrolments as many of these families have migrated back to their native states.

Thousands of pre-schools have shut down across the country. This is because parents of pre-school students simply do not believe in teaching their toddlers through online schooling, which is very much understandable. So, they simply cancel their child’s admission saying that they will take a break this year. With every pre-school shutting down, there are at least 5 to 10 teachers who become unemployed.

A direct result of this situation is the change in the mindset of school managements. They are now more focused on surviving than on providing optimal education. School managements are worried about retaining their teachers for the next academic year as they won’t be willing to continue anymore with half salaries. This is affecting the quality of education delivered and the biggest loss in this entire story is that of the student.

The loss of an entire year of schooling was already horrible and we are already looking at an even dreadful situation in the upcoming academic year. Schools are not expected to open up very soon and in such a scenario parents, teachers and school management must come together and arrive at an optimal solution in the current situation. It can never be a win-win situation for all but it can certainly be a better solution for all. In the next post, we shall discuss how we can arrive at these optimal solutions to ensure that there is minimum loss of our children’s education.