2,650 dropouts brought back to school in less than two months

Coimbatore: The office of the district chief education officer has managed to bring 2,650 ‘dropouts’ back to school since the second week of August this year.
The students, who were studying in government, aided, matriculation and CBSE schools, were either absent for a prolonged period or hadn’t joined any school after getting transfer certificates from their previous schools.
They were identified after their names figured in the common pool on the Education Management Information System (EMIS) portal, a central database on every school student.
Pointing out that a unique ID would be generated on the EMIS portal when a student joins a school, an official said the ID would migrate from one school to another as the student gets the transfer certificate from a school and joins another.
N Geetha, district chief education officer, said, “The unique ID can be used to track the students and their school. If a student doesn’t join any school after getting the transfer certificate, his/her name will be added to the common pool on EMIS automatically. They are generally considered dropouts. But many would have joined polytechnic after Class X. Those who failed in Class X or IX would have joined some industrial training institutes as well.”
While such details won’t be available on EMIS portal, she said, teachers were asked to check with their parents either over phone call or visiting them in person the real reason for being absent from schools.
Many parents in rural areas, she said, had migrated from one place to another with their wards for occupational reasons. “Since there are no physical classes, they are waiting for schools to reopen to get their wards join the schools. We could identify such students and make them join the neighbourhood schools so that they could get textbooks and study at home.”