Rainbow Primary School

 I was last at the school Fall 2019, just now I can head back!!

Rambabu, the Pratham leader for our state (Telangana) and his team are amazing. The Rainbow School now has an after school center, and after school tutoring program, and an in-school teacher training program. The after school program now has computer training! These computers will be used for some of the older kids, and I'm sure we'll get a lot more tech once things start rolling. 1. We now have four teachers working full-time at our after school center.  2. In the after school program, we have over 40 students and expect 20 more teenagers when computer and English instruction officially begin. 3. Letters to our sister school in Miami continue. 4. Our Rainbow School continues to host after-school activities as well!

Together with the students, parents, and teaching team, we did it. Ten years of the Rainbow Primary School. Our school is a government-funded, local-language (Telugu) school that serves 230 children every day absolutely free. We celebrated by opening  an after-school center last month with the best education NGO in the world, Pratham. For the past five years, I've worked on research projects and helped NGOs that have an interest in developing mobile tools for learning. Globally, there are three populations of students that need to close the education gap. 1. 52 million children globally not in school at all. Most are out of school for one or more of these reasons: conflict/no public services (fragile state), lack of legal papers, migrants, or they are female. Migration is a big issue in our area around the Rainbow School. 2. 200 million children globally are in school, but suffer from poor in-class teaching. These students cannot read at grade level. The most common reason...

For some time, the Pratham team has worked to design potential ways to collaborate with the Rainbow School. In particular, we are interested in using technology to foster learning in after-school hours and school holidays. At this time, we are eager to move forward and we are looking for advice and support from throughout our community. Email me at leighanne (at) gmail.com with your thoughts.

Today we are visiting to check in with the Rainbow School, deliver school supplies, and (most of all!) design the next year for the school with the teachers and the PRATHAM team. I can't wait!

I wanted to thank each of the teachers! Private Teachers: Meher Jain, English G. Prashanth, 4th Standard P. Raju, Computers and 5th Standard "Computer Raju!" K. Lakshmi Devi Y. Manjula U. Divya K. Renuka S. Sunitha Government Teachers Headmaster, G. Ramulu M. Parameshwari K. Sampath Kumari Thank you Teachers! HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

On Monday, August 18, I was so happy to return to see the Rainbow School. The teachers have made a plan to shift from Telugu to English medium. My friend at Pratham, one of the largest education NGOs -- serving 5 million children in South Asia and Africa -- agreed to help my teachers. My co-partner, Kalpana, is taking the lead on a facilities upgrade. She will oversee an upgrade to the preschool and main building. Kalpana and I have found donors in India and the United States. The children were sharp, completely up on their marks. The teachers were creative, driven, relentless. More to come!

Post by Sheryl Sandberg .

Today we had an excellent set of visitors, more to come. 

While Kappy and I (and Ismail) get the 2012 financial reports ready, the teachers are working hard to implement new ideas in their lesson plans. As usual, we have delays in government salaries for these teachers and delays in payments for various other needs at the school. Kappy is working on ways to help with the cash flow. She spoke to several area papers and received a good response from readers, some went to the trouble to call in and push the government to deliver these payments. Kappy is amazing. In more good news, the Mahindra Foundation is donating salary for a computer teacher for the Rainbow School for the next school year. 

The school continues to grow and expand in healthy ways. Our two teachers who had babies,  Divya and Sunitha, are back! Here is Sunitha in her classroom. The nonprofit partners and the local community continue to support the school. The Indian Literacy Project teacher is conducting ongoing English classes and loaning books from our new library. Very exciting! I have also heard our headmaster is energetically engaging the government to support the school alongside Kalpana Madam. I knew when I left the school in 2008 everything would work out because the teachers, the children and the parents would never let the school fail. It looks likely that the school will be awarded "Best" again for 2012-2013. I wish our sister schools, including the Madhapur Mandal School, all the best but now that Divya and Sunith are back I believe there is extra competition this year!

Preschool Report Our lovely preschool is ringed by large rocks, like the one on the right. In order to develop the land next door, the construction team needed to blast apart the big rocks into smaller rocks. Yesterday, the big rock on the left was blasted, just after the students left. No students were hurt, but as rock split it caused damage to a next door neighbor lying on the floor (she has polio) as well as our preschool.  She is fine now, but what a scare! The contractors are responding well, updates again soon. UPDATE: All is well, the little girl is healing up. The entire community flooded around the preschool with calls for the contractor to be careful.

Our annual report is available! CLICK HERE Still Top Government Primary School in Hy-Tech Area 220 Students, down from 280 in 2009 (part of the slum was torn down and not rebuilt) Challenges with high teacher turn over (expected-we have strategies in place) “B” average for nearly all the standards on Central Government Tests in 2009, “A” for fifth standard. A strong preschool program for 2 to 5 year olds. 64%+ funded by the Government of India (down from 70%) *****

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.