No ‘good’ school too far for parents~Many Nursery Kids Will Travel. Over 15km~Times Of India 24 Sep- Sumit Vohra of founder of admissionsnursery.com points out that with greater “disposable income, parents are looking for new-age schools and don’t mind keeping a dedicated vehicle with chauffeur. Plus, many parents want to block a seat in at least one sought-after school. There are also parents who don’t have ‘brands’ in their vicinity”.
TIMES NEWS NETWORK

New Delhi: In search of “good schools” and paranoid about the points system used for nursery admissions in Delhi, many parents are sending kids to NCR schools that are upward of 15 kilometres from home. In some cases, parents will have to arrange for transport, too.
Shruti Kapoor*, a Defence Colony-based chartered accountant, who’s admitted her son to a school about 15km away, says she’s “desperate because of the admission system in Delhi”. Most schools currently follow a points system in which points out of 100 are allocated to an aspirant according to various parameters, typically, distance from school, whether one or both parents are alumna, whether a sibling is attending the same school, and whether the candidate is a girl child or a first child. Candidates who fulfill most criteria get most points.
Kapoor has been studying the system and she doesn’t like the odds. “My son is a first child and I’m not an alumnus of any school close by.” She’ll try in Delhi again in December but till then she’s “secured a seat” at Lotus Valley, Noida. She is not on the bus route either. “The management was clear on that I’ll have to arrange for transport,” she says.
Sanjay Aggarwal, who lives in Laxmi Nagar, is sending his son to Delhi Public School, Sector 132, on the expressway, 18km away. “The distance seems like a lot but they have school transport and travel time is less.”
Suraj Suri stays in Sector Chi 4 in Greater Noida and will be sending his daughter to Lotus Valley, which is at a distance of 17-18km, from next year. He already has a son studying there. “One concern was that the child is going this far and another was that the school bus takes the highway,” says Suri. He’s found out since that the driver never drives above 60kmph and never stops on the highway. “In four years, we never had any problem.”
Activists, however, argue that proximity to school should be the only criterion for admitting students—distance also being a provision in the RTE Act—and that the system of admissions now is less child-friendly.