For more than one hundred days, the students of Satero Roshi Government Primary School have been sharing their playground and classroom with an uninvited guest: a giant, fallen chambal tree.
What started as a sudden natural disaster during a violent nor’wester storm on 13 May has transformed into a gruelling lesson in bureaucratic inertia.
Four months on, the massive tree remains exactly where it fell – crushing a school building, silencing a classroom, and turning the schoolyard into a hazard zone.
When the storm struck in mid-May, the towering chambal tree behind the school snapped, crashing directly onto the tin-shed building. The impact shattered a major portion of the roof, immediately rendering the room inside unusable.
This was no ordinary storage space; the damaged room served as the vibrant hub for the school’s pre-primary children and doubled as the school’s administrative office.
Since that afternoon, early-years education at the school has been completely suspended, and the school’s office has been displaced. The obvious solution – chopping up the tree and clearing the debris – has been entirely blocked by official regulations.
Because the fallen Chambal tree is classified as government property, the school authorities and the managing committee are legally forbidden from touching it. Doing so without formal authorization would violate strict state protocols.
“We immediately sent a written request to the Forest Department and other relevant departments to remove the tree,” explained the school’s Headmaster, Shahidur Rahman.
He lamented that normal lessons and administrative work can only resume once the government untangles its own red tape, clears the timber, and repairs the shattered structure.
The paper trail has indeed been moving, albeit slowly. Sadarpur Upazila Primary Education Officer Mamunur Rashid confirmed that his office followed government regulations and formally wrote to the Forest Department just days after the storm in May.
“We are hopeful that the Forest Department will soon complete the auction process to finally remove the tree,” he said.
Meanwhile, Acting Sadarpur Upazila Forest Officer Sujan Talukdar acknowledged receiving the school’s application and said “necessary measures” are underway to resolve the issue.
But as the paperwork moves through the auction pipeline, the children of the school must wait. For four months, their classroom has remained crushed under a giant tree – a stark daily reminder of the gap between administrative rules and immediate needs of a school.
