School is supposed to be a place where children are first introduced into society, without the monitoring of primary caregivers. The school culture must be positive, nurturing, and supportive of positive changes and improvement. It must foster creativity and participation without inequity. School culture is the underlying set of norms, values, traditions, ceremonies, and unwritten rules of behavior, action, and thinking. In the case of Bharathi Matriculation Higher Secondary School, the culture has developed into a set of dysfunctional values and beliefs, negative traditions, and a caustic way of interaction. This culture not only leads to psychosocial problems, depressive symptoms, self-esteem, and anxiety issues but also contributes to missed out opportunities for students due to the underutilization and suppression of their potentials.

Allegations:

• Inappropriate/unsolicited touching and perusal in the name of checking for undergarments, shorts, and the position of shawls, making the students feel uncomfortable and sexually violated
• Unwarranted singling out of the allegedly 'problematic' students for routine checks of their pants to search for hidden phones with no justification for this invasion of privacy
• Unnecessary policing every minute inside the school premises, with no exceptions even inside the restrooms. Deplorable monitoring of the activities of students even outside the school premises and on social media and misusing their personal life and choices to character assassinate them
• No proper training of students in sports, despite the presence of more than adequate number of PT staff. Academics are getting used as an excuse to keep students from participating in sports. Girls experience worse training and an upsetting amount of discrimination when it comes to sports activities
• Public shaming and abasement of students (irrespective of gender), more specifically girls, by insinuating/ outright suggesting that they are at school to impress the other gender and sleep around, in a much harsher and invective manner. Every personal choice (from one's accessories to where they stand/sit or who they associate with) is put through superfluous scrutiny, intruded, and frowned upon in a reprehensible manner
• Students with health issues being constantly humiliated for letting it affect attendance and academics, and for not being able to deal with said ailments silently. Sometimes, expressing of ailments were not taken seriously to the point of raising a fuss to even inform the parents (even when the physiotherapist informed of a case of dislocation, the student was carelessly made to wait for more than an hour before the parents were informed)
• Menstruation is considered as such a taboo subject that has to be kept from the opposite gender, be it the staff or students. Students don't even have the comfort to access the restrooms during class hours, and if they were to convey their need to use the restroom facilities due to menstruation to male staff, they were immediately reprimanded and shamed by the female staff for not silently dealing with menstruation problems
• Undue regular checking of bags and perusal and confiscation of contents within (pen drives etc.,) without the knowledge of the students.
• Discrediting of students to their friends to discourage the friendship and manipulating students to spy on their fellow peers and report back to the staff(even things like staying a little too long in the restrooms and chatting get reported, and in some cases even addressed personally by the principal)
• Students are actively discouraged from doing anything involving the opposite gender (keeping them from communicating or even looking in the general direction of the opposite sex, allotting separate corridors and staircases for boys and girls, making them sit at the opposite ends of the school if they were early to school, making boys practice sports in the evening and girls early in the morning despite the PT staff arriving late resulting in inadequate training, the staff and the principal taking time to personally address any occurrence of communication between them being recorded in the classroom cameras in a harsh and degrading manner)
• Sexualizing every single harmless action by the students and subjecting them to humiliation, slut-shaming, and body-shaming
• An alarming amount of verbal and emotional abuse by the staff is observed even for the smallest of issues (a student who hadn’t noticed the staff entering while taking a chair to their lab seat was verbally abused and slut-shamed with the involvement of two other staff, staff implying acts of favoritism by singling-out and targeting students they deem objectionable, cases of staff expressing caste-biased attitude)
• Some acts of physical abuse were also carried out among boys (cases of staff aggravating and goading them by character assassinating them and sometimes their parents with claimed use of degrading and foul invective, harassing them with unwarranted threats of handing them over to police under acts of eve-teasing, etc.)
• All these acts of abuse lead to chronic pain, clinical depression, anxiety, and so many other harmful consequences. (In one such case, when a student had attempted suicide, they were asked to take time off to make sure the others won’t know what had happened, effectively sweeping the whole issue under the rug. The staff even went so far as to accuse them of overreacting and slut-shaming them more than once)
• The small percentage of academically well-versed, overachieving students are given preferential treatment, and students with less academic scores, and the students deemed disruptive by the staff are constantly insulted and subjected to a cruel, misguided negative motivation (sometimes even alienating them by making them sit separately on the floor for extended periods, etc.) yet, no proper measures whatsoever, are taken by the staff to try to understand the problems and struggles to help them
• Bharathi school is a toxic environment with so many issues of abuse, harassment, and tyranny. It instills misled thoughts of sexism, casteism, and favoritism in the minds of young children through their actions and smothers any sense of creativity and individuality in a student. They treat students not as humans but as a mere means to achieve fame and glory.

The above accusations are some of the many things that the students at Bharathi have endured and still enduring. By signing this petition, we demand an official apology from the school administration and the staff responsible and the implementation of immediate and concrete changes under guidelines as suggested below;
• Professional Counsellor should be available for students inside the campus at all times
• A strong Student Board Council should be appointed in a democratic manner that would have an actual say in the school rules and regulations
• Providing well-equipped sports room and assigning sports staff who genuinely train students without any discriminative or preferential treatment
• Arranging workshops and the likes for staff to train them to handle and treat students in a better and humane manner
• Staff accused of sexually violating the students must be held accountable, and appropriate action has to be taken without any compromise
• No acts of abuse are to be tolerated, and severe actions have to be taken in case of any such occurrences
• Students must be provided a reprieve from staff monitoring out of school premises and from the relentless policing inside the restrooms
• Students privacy must be respected, and they should be free from staff intrusion in their personal life
• Acts of slut-shaming, body-shaming, unwarranted humiliation, use of foul-invective, and sexualization of trivial matters have to stop
• The changes brought about should be communicated officially. As students, all we expect is that the school should be a safe space where we can discover our talents and potential, nurture them and express them in a healthy, positive, and productive manner with genuine and impartial support and guidance