This class VI-XII school has acquired a national reputation for offering rigorous academics, modern sports facilities and excellent pastoral care – Autar Nehru Spread across an expansive 52-acre green campus in the industrial township of Selaqui, 20 km from Dehradun, popularly known as the boarding schools capital of India with 300 secondaries, SelaQui International School (SIS) is a new generation fully residential co-ed school with an enrolment of 300 students and 35 teachers. Promoted in 2000 under the aegis of the Gurukul Trust by former IAS officer-turned-educationist Om Pathak, also chairman of the DPS Ghaziabad Society which runs a chain of five day schools, this class VI-XII school has steadily acquired a national reputation for offering rigorous academics, wide range of extra-curricular and sports facilities and excellent pastoral care. In the latest EducationWorld India School Rankings 2014, the CBSE-affiliated SIS is ranked among the Top 30 co-ed boarding schools countrywide, and #4 in Uttarakhand. We firmly believe that the co-ed boarding school system is the best way to prepare young people to meet the complex challenges of the 21st century. In our state-of-the-art campus, highly qualified teachers provide excellent academic tuition, individual attention to students and modern pastoral care to develop every student’s academic and sports education. Our objective is to shape leaders of tomorrow, people who are capable, talented, confident but also humane, sensitive and imaginative, says Rashid Sharfuddin, an alumnus of St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, the University of Bath, UK, and former housemaster of the top-ranked Doon School for 11 years, prior to his appointment as headmaster of SelaQui International School last year. Together with wife Hina Sharif Khan, who quit a successful legal career to take charge as director of admissions at SIS, Sharfuddin has drawn up a blueprint to communicate SIS™ unique characteristics to parents to increase student enrolment to 360 by 2017. According to Rashid Sharfuddin, SIS is the only boarding school countrywide to offer its unique Gurukul (IIT and medical entrance exams coaching) and Arjuna (sports) programmes to students. In 2011, SIS signed a collaboration agreement with Kota-based Resonance Eduventures Pvt. Ltd to offer a parallel two-year IIT-JEE coaching programme to class XI-XII students. Last year, six SIS students secured admission into the country’s premier IITs. Similarly, for arts and commerce streams, higher secondary students are coterminously prepared for competitive public exams such as CLAT (Common Law Aptitude Test), CPT (Common Proficiency Test for chartered accountancy), SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test), TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), NTSE (National Talent Search Exam). Under the Arjuna programme, prospective tennis and cricket stars are coached and mentored by professionals and gym, physiotherapy and nutrition experts. The school’s sprawling campus with a 100-year-old peepal tree (ficus religiosa or sacred fig) at its epicentre features low-rise architecture reminiscent of English country homes ” stone and red brick buildings with slanted tile roofs. Nalanda, the academic block, hosts 32 classrooms equipped with projectors, Smart boards and science labs. The school’s well-stocked library houses 15,000 volumes and 50 journal…
