The whole school on the riverwalk at 7:50 on the first Monday of term, house shirts by row, the boathouse behind.
A K-12 IB school on the south bank of the Adyar, where 1,140 children learn in four houses named for the rivers of Tamil Nadu.
Four pictures from one ordinary Tuesday in August. We take photographs the way we take attendance: every day, in order, with the time on them.
Children join at Pre-KG and most stay until the Diploma. The programme changes twice on the way and the fee steps up with it; the campus, the house and usually the class never change. Grade 12 is small on purpose — we cap the Diploma at sixty.
average Diploma points across 58 candidates. Four scored 43 or more. Forty-one are studying outside India, seventeen of them in Chennai, Vellore and Bengaluru.
Every child is sorted on the first day of Pre-KG and stays until Grade 12, siblings together. The house colour is the shirt, the boat and the notebook. The course of each river is drawn across its own colour below, in the order the four rivers run down Tamil Nadu — Palar dashed, because for most of its length it runs under the sand.
The river that feeds the delta. Rowing, swimming and the boathouse crews.
Head of house: Ms Anitha Rajendran
Holds: Regatta, swimming gala
Madurai's river. Debate, the student council and the Friday assembly.
Head of house: Mr Karthik Balaji
Holds: Debate shield, Tamil oratory
The perennial river. The kitchen garden, the mangrove deck and field science.
Head of house: Ms Divya Krishnamoorthy
Holds: Sports day, garden cup
The river under the sand. Theatre, music and the design studio.
Head of house: Mr Suresh Venkatesan
Holds: Drama festival, music night
This is the walk our Grade 8 guides give visiting families on Saturday mornings, drawn in the order you would actually walk it. Saturdays at 9:00 and 11:00, six families to a guide, and the river is on your left the whole way back.
“We are a small school by choice. Nine students to a teacher means the teacher knows which one has not eaten breakfast, and eleven acres on a river means there is always somewhere to walk it off.”
Dr Kavitha Ramanathan, Head of School. Formerly Deputy Head at Kodaikanal International School; PhD in science education, University of Madras.
Age cut-offs for every grade, the dated timeline from enquiry to seat, and the full fee table in rupees. No capitation, no building fund, no annual increase above 8%.
See the process and feesAnnual, payable in three terms: June, October and February.