Chennai: School rallies behind teacher, denies charge
These CCTV footage are monitored by four people
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2015-07-15 03:55 GMT
Chennai: School authorities at Good Hope Matriculation Higher Secondary School on Thursday denied that any incident of a student being molested had taken place on the premises or that any of their teachers was involved. Stating that their school was under electronic surveillance, they added that CCTV footage did not show any such untoward incident.
Principal Barnabas Osborn Sundar said the teacher had been arrested without proper procedure being followed or an arrest warrant. “The police did not come to our school and inquire but simply arrested him after 2 am yesterday on a false complaint. We checked the CCTV footage several times but we did not find anything. It may have happened outside the school and by someone else,” he said.
According to the teachers, the computer teacher had been working for the last seven years in the school and until now no such case has happened. P. Sreelatha, a physics teacher who has been working for the past 11 years in the school, said he was a very good-natured person and is unlikely to molest a child. “I am 100 percent sure, it is a false complaint,” she said.
The principal said there are around 16 CCTV cameras in the corridors and each class and laboratories has its own CCTV. Paging system and speakers have also been installed everywhere, so that if a student is in some trouble and shouts, help will be at hand.
These CCTV footage are monitored by four people. Apart from this the school also has a campus administrator for vigilance. Out of 50 faculty, who were women, the computer teacher was the only male person.
Leela Prince, the campus administrator, said that as usual she checked the classes during break and lunch hours but she did not find anything unusual. “ I check the classes even when it does not have any teachers. But nothing unusual happened that day,” she said.
Further N. Manikannan who monitors the CCTV footage stays from the start of the school at 8.20 am till evening 7 ‘o’ clock, but even he did not find anything unusual while checking the CCTV footages.
While teachers knew about the incident, the parents of other students were ignorant about it. John Abraham, a parent whose daughter studies in class one, was astonished to hear such an incident “ I did not hear about such incident. This is really shocking and fearful as my daughter also studies in the same school,” he said.