Parents seek roll back of Indian School Muscat fee hike

Muscat: A group of parents who send their children to Indian School Muscat (ISM) have drafted a memorandum, demanding a rollback of the recent fee hikes.
The memorandum, addressed to the president of the School Management Committee (SMC) of ISM, said the fee hike was unilateral and in violation of an earlier understanding between the management and parents.
The parents were referring to three separate fee hikes. One was the increase in the tuition fee by OMR2 per month at ISM. The second one was the hike of OMR6 for kindergarten 2, also at the same school.
Infrastructure fee
The other was the non-refundable OMR10 infrastructure fee for all Indian schools, which can be paid in instalments.
The memorandum accuses the school of poor financial management and needlessly hiking the fees regularly.
Furthermore, it pointed out that the monthly fee had more than doubled in seven years. “We strongly protest harmful decisions affecting us. Till the academic year 2011, the fee had been OMR19 monthly.
With the proposed increase, the monthly fees are going to be in the range of OMR35.500-OMR39.500 in 2018.
“Amazingly, the KG fee at IS-Ghubra (which is under the same management and uses the same curriculum) is OMR41.5, which is OMR2 higher than the main school. This means, we have an increase of more than 100 per cent in seven years’ time, a phenomenon that was virtually unknown till the year 2011,” the memorandum read.
“You once again failed to take the parents into confidence and discuss with them before taking decisions that violate the rights of parents, despite earlier agreements from the Board of Directors and SMC that crucial recommendations such as this one will be discussed in parent open forums before being finalised,” the parents added.
“While the school was running with the old fee of OMR19 until 2011, it could accumulate a lot of surplus, which was not only invested in building other schools, but it also succeeded in keeping millions of rials as fixed deposits in the bank,” the memorandum said. The parents said many of them could ill afford a hike because their salaries were not enough.
“One of the most crucial responsibilities that SMC has to keep in its agenda is that ISM is a community school and the parents in the lower income strata don’t have any other educational facility for their kids. The members of the school committee—almost always from elite and affluent economic backgrounds—have shown little appreciation of this reality,” it read. The parents also complained of an earlier cost effective plan being ignored.
“As a thorough investigation by a parent committee in 2016 demonstrated there is absolutely no requirement to increase the fees and an efficient school management can actually save a lot of extra money for better pay for teachers and for infrastructure development from the existing fee structure. But unfortunately, both the SMC and BOD refused to consider this,” the memorandum added.