Educate After-School Downtrodden Children in India

Dear Partners,

Greetings to you from HEARDS - India!

The schools closed abruptly not giving the teachers any time to tie the topics into a proper conceptual framework. Further, the break in schooling is a lot longer than the typical summer holidays. The break is already 7 months long with no end in sight.

While this is a problem for all children in India, this particularly affects the poor and increases the already vast disparity that exists between the poor and the elite. Educated parents will find ways to continue engaging their children in ways that stimulate the child’s mind. Further, the elite schools find ways to engage the students through online classes, Whatsapp assignments, Learning Management Systems like Google Classroom, zoom calls and a wide variety of online contents. These are non-starters in our rehabilitation centre, as most of the children do not have access to a smart phone or computer.

Many of our teachers come from the slums/villages that we serve or other villages that are similar in profile. These slums/villages were fairly unaffected by the Corona virus pandemic and they were quite open internally while not allowing free movement to people from the outside. The children in these slums/villages were anyway playing with other children in the village and moving about within the village. We felt we could start after school program in villages where our teachers live. The children will come to the after school program for a little while and the teacher will give them some activities to do during the class or at home till the next class. This will enable the teacher to handle multiple batches one on each day and thus keep the class size small. This concept helps in overall development of the children.

There were several challenges. In addition, clearly, this after school centre cannot function without the full support from the local community. They need to send the children, allow the teacher to get together with the children which however many precautions we take, brings an element of risk of transmitting the dreaded virus, etc. In addition, in many cases, the teachers’ houses were not big enough to bring the children and conduct the class, and the classes had to be conducted in some public space. Here are a couple of photos of schools being held in teachers houses.

However now the schools have been started and there was huge reduction in CORONA cases and therefore we are conducting these after school program successfully now.

Your donations helped a lot during this pandemic period. I request you to please kindly share this with your friends and relatives as this is one of the inevitable project of HEARDS.

Thanking you,

With fond regards,