High court orders gave relief to schools tension to parents; permitted to collect admission fee
Kanwar Inder Singh/ royalpatiala.in/ Chandigarh
In an order passed by Justice Nirmaljit kaur of Punjab and Haryana High court on the petitions filed by Independent School’s Associations (Chandigarh), Public Schools Welfare Association and others, The Recognized and Affiliated School association (RASA) Punjab along with others ordered that “schools are permitted to collect their admission fee, all schools irrespective whether they offered online classes, during the lockdown period or not are entitled to collect the tuition fee. However, they will continue to endeavour and impart online or distance learning, so that education is not adversely impacted due to the present or future lockdowns imposed due to covid 19 pandemic.”
The school management of each school shall work out their actual expenditure incurred under the annual charges for the period the school remained closed and recover only such genuine expenditure incurred by them including actual transport charges and actual building charges but shall not recover any charge for this period for any activity or facility towards, which no expenditure was incurred. However the annual charges for the remaining period shall be recovered as already fixed by the school.
The school shall restrain themselves for the reasons as mentioned above from increasing the fee for the year 2020-21 and adopt the same fee structure as of 2019-20.
Any parent not able to pay the school fee in the above terms may file their application along with necessary proof about their financial status which shall be looked into by the school authority and after looking into it sympathetically give concession or exempt the entire fee as the case may be. In case the parent is still aggrieved in any manner with an adverse decision by the school on his application he may approach the regulatory body so constituted under section 7 of the Punjab Regulation of fee of Un aided Educational Institution act 2016.
In case any school is facing a financial crunch for not having charged the increased fee for the year 2020-21, may move a representation to district education officer along with its proof of the same, who shall look into it and pass appropriate orders with in 3 weeks of the receipts of such an application. However, this may be exercised only in a very hard case where the school is facing financial crunch and has no reserved resources to meet the expenses.
June,30,2020
