Kolkata: A school’s decision to isolate a young student for nearly six hours for wearing rubber shoes instead of regular school shoes after heavy rain soaked her footwear has triggered concern among parents, especially with monsoon flooding affecting daily school routines.The incident came to light after the child’s father, a doctor, wrote about his daughter’s experience. He said his younger daughter wentto school in full uniform, but wore a pair of rubber shoes because her school shoes were still wet from the previous day’s rain.“My younger daughter’s school shoes got soaked in yesterday’s heavy rain. She went to school today wearing a full school uniform, except the wet shoes were replaced by a pair of rubber shoes,” he wrote.According to the father, both parents were at their respective hospitals when they received a call from the school informing them that the child could not be accommodated because she was not wearing the prescribed shoes. The parents said they requested the school to allow her to attend classes for the day and assured them that they would arrange a spare pair at the earliest.“By the time the call came that they wouldn’t be able to accommodate a child, joyful and happy to go to school even in this rain, we were both in hospitals and requested repeatedly to take her in only for the day,” he wrote.He alleged that the response from the school lacked empathy. “The voice at the other end sounded more like a law enforcement person than a caring class teacher,” he said.The father claimed the child was made to sit alone in an empty room for six hours and was not allowed to attend class. He said the experience left her emotionally distressed.“They made her sit in an empty room for six long hours, made her feel alone and deserted without attending a class, and broke her emotionally as she refused to talk to any of us when she came back home,” he wrote.The incident has raised larger questions about how schools should handle uniform-related issues during the monsoon, when children often have to walk through flooded roads and return home with soaked shoes and uniforms. Parents are asking whether a child should be marked absent in such circumstances, or whether families are expected to buy multiple pairs of leather school shoes to prevent punishment for a situation beyond the child’s control.The father questioned the educational value of such disciplinary action. “In what protocol and what part of pedagogy did they learn to refuse a pupil for the incompleteness of an attire? It’s their highest form of incompleteness as a teacher,” he wrote.He added that the child learnt a painful lesson from the incident: “A child just learnt that an accidental absence of an ornament is more precious than a curious soul.”The episode has renewed debate over the need for schools to adopt flexible, child-sensitive policies during extreme weather, particularly when the deviation from uniform rules is temporary and caused by rain or flooding. Parents say that while discipline and uniformity may be important, they should not come at the cost of a child’s dignity, emotional well-being or access to learning.
