Rainbow Primary School

Our school year is May (really, June) through 1st of April. Here is a pic from the first day of school 2011. This picture is my inspiration. You can tell the lunch was VERY important that first day, and this will remain in my thoughts for the rest of the school year.

Vivek at the Poli Sci deparment has a brilliant blog with his articles, on corruption and more. (My fav of his pages: "Naan Fiction," get it - Naan like the bread? naan like roti? naan... you get it) Please take 5 mins to read his "From Fractions to Millions" because this is what I'm going to dedicate my work life to for the next however many decades. This work and NGO work like Pratham are the hope for my Rainbow Kids to reach their dreams - literacy, life skills, fair chance to have a livelihood, accountable government. http://viveks.info/from-fractions-to-millions-getting-more-people-to-challenge-corruption-using-mobile-phones Visited my old headsmitress' family in San Jose (her son Suresh is at HP), played with the one year old (just got her head shaved for her 1 years ceremony). I miss my Rainbow School student's little brothers and sisters so much. It was so fun to "recruit" them every day - I would stop every baby and say, ...

My new friend, Pritam (see the last post) left Hyderabad and the Rainbow School, came all the way from India to Stanford University to join a group of us to welcome Madhav Chavan, the founder and director of Pratham, one of the largest NGOs in the world and certainly my top pick for most effective. Paul Kim, CTO and Assistant Dean at the School of Education, Vivek Srinivasan who runs the Program on Liberation Technology on campus, Molly McMahon who is an impact investor in the budget private school space in developing countries, Pritam and myself hosted Madhav for a roundtable discussion on innovation and how we want to help Pratham, and how we don't know how exactly to do it but want to experiment and innovate alongside his needs. Madhav spoke of how the next years for Pratham will not be like the past, how we can build schools as fast as possible, but there will not be enough teachers - certainly not enough good ones. From this need, he talked about creating "learning ...

My new friend from Georgetown, Pritab, surprised the heck out of me by taking the time to visit the school and take these great pictures. THANK YOU Pritab! He is studying the varied quality of teaching across India - he's been everywhere. Congratulations on a great research trip. Click the picture to see them all!

We found out the preschool funding was short, the entire education budget is short for the state. So they are helping to fund preschools out of the health budget, and the preschools are called an anganwadi (like a feeding center/creche) but they are still preschools and under the watch of the education ministry. We also have a new headmaster and teachers! We will get pictures soon. And maybe even video! ECE: Vacant, we have a great lead on someone. 1st Class: Laxmi Devi and assistant teacher Renuka. 2nd Class A: Divya, B, Sunitha - two of our original teachers 3rd Class, Gowri - one of our original teachers 4th Class: Manjula 5th Class: We have a teacher assigned to us, but this may not work out and we will find someone. Our new headmaster is Ramulu. Here he is! ANd here is one of our Mandal Education Officer, Chary, pushing aside the chairs reserved for visiting dignitaries and sitting on the ground with some of our preschoolers.

Donors Chris Wright (pictured, 2nd picture, the big goofy guy with the little kids all around him) and Shadi Farazian (3rd pic) helped build the preschool building in a record 14 days with superman construction worker, Sai Kumar's dad! We just learned the preschool will be closed by the government, replaced with a nutritional feeding center (not a teaching center) called an Anganwadi. This was a community decision, not one involving the school. We were surprised! Our old 1st standard teacher Adi Laxmi was appointed to run the center. I have no firm idea of the quality of the center, and will watch very closely. Since they are occupying a building donated by Americans, I am going to ensure there is preschool instruction taking place in the building. If Adi Laxmi teaches, that is fine. If not, we will make a move. Here she is, radiant in tangerine (right) Good Luck Adi Laxmi!

Today we heard the news that our headmistress, Vijaya Laxmi, will be moving on to a new school. This suits the team at the Rainbow School very well, they needed a leader who was interested to engage the community. We do not know who our new headmaster will be, but we understand it will be a very senior man, one year from retirement. He will come with a junior who will take on the headmistress role after he leaves. More will come from our great, fabulous Mandal Education Officer, Jaganmohan Chary. Here is a picture of our first headmistress, Usha Rani, who was a stellar leader and has volunteered to help with the transition to the new headmaster.

I walked into the school for a surprise inspection (after a year's absence) and this was the teaching I saw! Teacher Divya (she just got married! congratulations!) and Teacher Esther (second video).

I visited the school in February, lots of pictures and updates to come. Our 2010 Annual Report will be up next week. Our budget is about to get a little help from the Government, the new student-to-teacher ratio will be 60 instead of 70 to 1 We hold at 40 to 1, so this means ours will go down a bit.