School shocker: Delivery in washroom!

The birth of a child to a girl enrolled in a government residential school in Yadgir should cause both shock and embarrassment to the authorities and management of the school. Shock because the girl was attending classes. Embarrassment because what should happen in a maternity hospital, happened in a school.

While it is not unusual for under-aged girls to get married and deliver babies in rural areas in violation of the minimum age of marriage, its occurrence in a government residential school, and in its washroom at that, has come as an utter surprise.

That physical changes and psychological behaviour of a pregnant teenager should go unnoticed in a school for so long, challenges the claim of disbelief.

While the Karnataka Residential Educational In stitutions Society (KREIS) is expected to identify the sources of lapses, it is imperative that such schools have counsellors who could be privy to such information by being in regular touch with the inmates at the school.