Act Now

Despite our efforts to communicate and reason with the current Brothers leadership that runs SPS, they have demolished two beloved restorable buildings – the Hospital Building, probably the most beautiful one on campus, and the Middle School Building, where we spent our formative years. SPAI started a movement in 2023 which led to a Times of India Kolkata article, and the West Bengal Heritage Commission’s (WBHC) intervention. SPS has found a way to follow conservation principles minimally and has formally declared they are against heritage status for SPS.  However, a mass movement of alumni and the public will convince the WBHC, which is open to it, that heritage status should be granted.

You can do a lot! Here are the ways you can have the biggest impact now:

  • Support our critically important public petition whose signatures the West Bengal Heritage Commission needs: XXXXX
  • Get all your family members and friends to sign the petition…and get them to make it viral.
  • Take a leadership role in your batch by forming a small team to individually send messages to batchmates and follow up until they have finished it. To volunteer formally: YYYYYY
  • Add all your batchmates to our Whatsapp community ZZZZZZ and Facebook Group AAAAAAA
  • Contact media people you know and contact us if you get them interested in covering our underdog story battling to preserve heritage against the forces of vested interests

The Christian Brothers (legally Congregation of Christian Brothers of India, CCBI) still run SPS and other CB schools even though they have largely left classrooms to become property managers and administrators for these schools. The last Brothers to teach significantly at SPS are aging and are not in the leadership of the Brothers, which is based in Delhi’s St. Columba’s school, and called the Provincial Leadership Team (PLT). The Provincial Leader is Steve Fernandes and the  A Community Leader/Bursar in Asansol reports to this PLT. The Principal of SPS (currently Nigel D’Souza) has limited powers and answers to the Community Leader (Leonard Lobo) and Bursar (Sunil Lobo) of Asansol. The previous Community Leader cum Bursar was Walter Vaz who led the demolition of two beloved restorable buildings with Simon Coelho (formerly Head of Schools and Ministries Office of the PLT) during Nigel D’Souza’s tenure.

What we are currently doing:

  • A movement to persuade the Brothers and government agencies to preserve the SPS campus, build in harmony with its traditional architecture and spaces, and get it Grade I heritage listing as it would already have if it was in Kolkata.
  • A movement to persuade the Brothers to treat SPS alumni as equal partners in the strategic development and future of SPS.
  • Help alumni network professionally and personally through chapters and groups under a Whatsapp community
  • Help alumni find the help and benefits they need
  • Operate the largest and most engaged online and in-person communities of SPS alumni

This is a representative but incomplete list of our past projects:

  • Preserving and sharing our collective heritage and history
  • Funded international magazine subscriptions for school library in the early 2000s
  • Initiated broadband access for students in 2005, donating funds and equipment to SPS
  • Organized numerous alumni GTGs spanning a decade, in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, NYC, Boston, London, Seattle, Los Angeles, etc.
  • Organized a London GTG that was attended by Br. Beddoe and Mrs. Lucas
  • Organized a 5-day “SPAI Olympiad” for SPS students in 2010 where they were taught various life skills through Dragon Race, City Designing, Crisis Response, etc.
  • Conducted video interviews of several Brothers and an alumnus from Class of ’42
  • Initiated three major reunions on campus – attended by hundreds of alumni
  • Created over 100 private Facebook groups for each batch, region and interest group, spending hundreds of hours to seed them
  • Grew a network of about 4,500 alumni across Facebook and Yahoo groups, reconnecting hundreds of long-lost friends
  • Manually digitized records going back to 1897
  • Hired two Alumni Relations Officers in 2006 for a period, becoming the first school alumni body in India to do so
  • Conducted several awards ceremonies to honour almost 100 teachers, Brothers and staff (including grounds staff)
  • Surveyed alumni opinion in a comprehensive 2013 survey of about 450 verified alumni on the basic tenets of an association
  • Conducted Nobilitas Awards for students (including Sword of Nobility) in 2012 to recognize and encourage skills beyond academics
  • Created over 60 online sheets for each batch to help build their class and section lists to find alumni, increase engagement and attendance

We are currently focused on the battle to preserve our campus. If we lose that fight, it will be hard to motivate alumni to care for a campus they don’t recognize anymore. However, we intend to:

  • Form a new constitution and bylaws and organize global elections
  • Mobilize our army of volunteers and delegate many responsibilities
  • Improve ways in which alumni can benefit from each other

You are a SPAI member for life simply be having studied at SPS for a year. We have thousands of alumni in our group, but we don’t have the contact info for all of them.

There is no fee to belong. We may have donor recognition levels in the future, but those are optional.

If you have given your contact info before you are probably registered, but we would like you to join on this here as well so you can access any alumni-only content: XXXXXXX

This is the home for all alumni, where all alumni have equal value wherever they live, and there is no financial barrier to belonging – and where the leadership draws its credibility by being aligned with what a majority of alumni want.

So if you have been a significant leader or donor in any alumni body, whether that was under the umbrella of SPOBA, SPAI, or SPAAA, all your contributions – whether as a volunteer, leader, or donor – matter to us, and we will be ensuring, through crowdsourcing, and your help, that we have a master database that captures and recognizes your contributions irrespective of the decade it was made in.

This is a complicated history, but this is our concise version of it. Since the past, while interesting to some, isn’t where the future lies.

In the run-up to the 1991 Centenary, SPOBA was formed to help with the festivities, and its membership, at the start and for its existence, were mostly local alumni and functioned essentially as an Asansol Chapter of SPS alumni. It was seen as the official alumni body. SPOBA had in its heyday, in 1991, a Kolkata Chapter in addition to the Asansol one. Then in 2001, SPAI was started as an online effort to bring together the 90%-95% of alumni who also live outside of Asansol with a vision to help SPS become a world-class school.  That effort foundered due to institutional resistance from SPS, wariness of SPOBA in seeing another player on its turf, and a failure of SPAI in being able to bridge that gap. Nevertheless, SPAI and SPOBA joined hands for a major Reunion in 2009. In 2013 SPS wanted a single body to be formed, and when negotiations came to a standstill, SPS formed a new body SPAAA by including the leaders of SPOBA and excluding the senior leaders of SPAI, just a few young representatives of SPAI. That resulted in a multi-year quagmire that resulted in an underwhelming turnout for the 125th Anniversary. SPAI and SPAAA leaders had merger talks in 2016, but even after terms were agreed to SPAAA’s rank and file members wouldn’t agree to the terms, ending that process. SPAI organized the largest elections in SPS history (the highest vote-getter is the current VP of SPAI) which was overseen by Vishnu Som of NDTV, a Magsaysay Award winner, and the former election commissioner of Haryana. Then near the end of 2016, SPS removed SPAAA from its website and said that it would be open to events from all alumni groups. And it was. But other than a reunion organized on very short notice, SPS didn’t respond to or approve several proposals SPAI made to help students – scholarships, etc. At that time, SPAAA leaders lost interest having lost the exclusive ability to organize campus events. This lack of engagement continued for years, and through the phase where Brothers refused to respond to any letters from us regarding demolitions even before any demolitions happened.

Then in the middle of 2024, as SPS felt a need to create a counterweight to SPAI’s movement against the demolitions on campus, it encouraged SPAAA to revive and organize campus events, in return for taking a public stance against heritage status for SPS, which they explicitly stated at a meeting on 6th August, 2024. Three SPAAA leaders who are indebted to or dependent on the Brothers for personal reasons (income, campus weddings, etc) showed up at the meeting and stated their body was “against heritage status” for their alma mater.