Once among Lahore's finest institutions, Divisional Public School has spent three decades in silent decline — its buildings frozen in the 1960s, its principal's chair empty for months on end, and its very land slipping away in a courtroom its own governors failed to defend. Alumni say the time for polite requests is over.

LAHORE — Walk through the corridors of Divisional Public School (DPS) today and you are walking through a time capsule — but not the kind anyone should be proud of. The white boards on most classroom walls are the same ones installed in the 1960s. The windows have not been replaced. Alumni who return to visit describe the buildings, once a symbol of civic pride, in a single, damning phrase: “like a horror house.”

This is not nostalgia curdling into exaggeration. It is a documented, years-long pattern of institutional neglect — and it is accelerating. Today, DPS sits without a principal. The post has been advertised three separate times and left unfilled. The most recent commissioner tasked with overseeing the search has just been transferred out — meaning the school will likely limp through several more months with no permanent academic leadership at all.

A GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE BUILT TO FAIL
At the heart of DPS's collapse is not a lack of history, prestige, or alumni goodwill — it is a governance structure that virtually guarantees neglect. The President of the DPS Board of Governors is, by design, the sitting Commissioner. Commissioners in Pakistan's civil bureaucracy rotate frequently, often every few months, moved between postings with no continuity of institutional memory and no personal or professional investment in the school's long-term future.

For a sitting commissioner — juggling district administration, law and order, and dozens of competing priorities — a decades-old school is rarely more than a footnote. The result is a revolving door of absentee chairpersons, none in office long enough to see a reform through, let alone be held accountable for its absence.

“A school that changes its chairman every few months has, in effect, no chairman at all.”

THREE YEARS OF DAMAGE THAT OUTPACES FIFTY
Perhaps the most damning finding of this investigation is also the most recent. Alumni and current stakeholders describe the decline of DPS over just the last three years, under the present board, as more substantial than the decline accumulated over the entire preceding five decades. If DPS's slide from the 1980s onward was slow erosion, the last three years have been a landslide.

At the centre of that landslide, sources say, is direct and deep-rooted interference blatant violation of rules and imposition of personal agenda by few board members in the school's day-to-day operational matters — decisions on staffing, discipline, security protocols, and administrative systems that should sit with professional school management, not with a rotating board. That interference has severely damaged the school's operating systems, its security arrangements, and its overall performance when measured against previous years.

Compounding the damage is a pattern of appointments driven by favour rather than merit. The placement of incompetent, favoured individuals in various positions across the school has created deep resentment at every level of the DPS employment hierarchy — from senior staff to support workers — further corroding morale in an institution that was already struggling to hold itself together.

Three years of board interference has done more damage than fifty years of neglect.

THE CRESCENT MODEL SCHOOL COMPARISON
The starkest evidence of what DPS could have been sits just across the city. Crescent Model School was established in roughly the same era — the 1960s. But unlike DPS, it is governed by a board of managing trustees drawn from the private sector: individuals with skin in the game, continuity of leadership, and direct accountability for outcomes.

The divergence between the two institutions since then is not a matter of luck or location. It is a case study in governance. One school has a stable, invested board and has grown into a thriving, modern institution. The other has been passed, almost accidentally, between a succession of transferable civil servants — and it shows, in cracked plaster, outdated wiring, and stagnant academic standards.

LOSING GROUND — LITERALLY
The cost of this institutional drift is no longer confined to falling academic standards. It is now measured in acres. The Model Town Society has moved in court to reclaim land from DPS — and won. Not because the claim was unanswerable, but because, alumni say, no one on the school's rotating leadership treated the case as a priority worth fighting for. DPS reportedly failed to properly pursue its own defence in court.

A school that cannot hold on to its own land is a school whose governance has failed at the most basic level. This was not a natural disaster. It was a failure of attention — the direct, foreseeable consequence of putting an always-changing, always-distracted bureaucrat in charge of an institution that needs sustained, personal stewardship.

THE ALUMNI RESPONSE: A FORMAL ADVOCACY CAMPAIGN
Enough, say DPS's old students. A growing group of alumni is now organising a formal advocacy campaign — one aimed squarely at the corridors of power that have overseen this decline by default rather than by design. Their demands are direct and specific:

—    Remove the office of Commissioner as the automatic, ex-officio President of the DPS Board of Governors instead appoint as ex-officio member if necessary.

—    Install a stable, credible academic leader in that role instead — alumni are proposing figures such as the Minister Education, Secretary Education, Secretary P&D, Vice Chancellor of Punjab University or the Vice Chancellor of Government College University (GCU), individuals with continuity, academic standing, and a genuine stake in education governance.

—    Dissolve present board and formulate more vibrant and pro-active members who should be able to contribute more constructively towards improvement rather damage.

—    Launch an immediate, three-year, massive restructuring programme covering infrastructure, curriculum, teaching methodology, and academic leadership — with the explicit goal of restoring DPS to its original standing.

—    Urgently resolve the vacant principal's post, and safeguard the school's land and legal interests going forward.

‘IT’S NOW OR NEVER’
For the alumni driving this campaign, this is not sentimental fundraising — it is a rescue operation for an institution that shaped generations of Lahore's students and, they argue, can still shape generations more, if it survives the next few years intact.

“We are done being spectators to our school's decline,” organisers say. Their message to fellow old students is simple: this is the moment to show up — not with nostalgia, but with pressure, planning, and persistence, aimed at the officials and institutions who can actually change DPS's governance structure.

It's Now or Never.

JOIN THE CAMPAIGN
The Alumni Advocacy Group is calling on every serious, committed old student of Divisional Public School to join this effort — to help design the campaign strategy, build the case for decision-makers, and carry this demand into every relevant office of government and academia until it is heard. If you believe DPS deserves better than three more decades of decline, this is the moment to step forward.

This is our alma mater. Its future is still, for now, ours to fight for.