Rainbow Primary School

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.

Kalpana Madam just wrote in describing the fun at the school on Children's Day. Here is her report: ***** From 8.45 to 10am all the children were in their classrooms having fun with their respective class teacher. Then they all assembled down and the program started at about 11am. Debate 4th class topic- Nehru(as november 14th, his b'day is celebrated as childrens day). There were 5 participants. Debate 5th class topic-polution. there were 6 participants from rainbow plus 3 from other schools. This was followed by singing and dancing. After that it was drama. 3rd class did a great show, Lion and the rabbit/ the clever rabbit. It was all a great effort from Gowri and sujatha.They had made animal masks for each animal. The play was simple, with only masks and no other costumes, but it was a very good show. 2nd class also did a great show. The play was 'bottle gourd wedding'. About 12to 13 kids showed up, each with a vegetable mask. The bride was the bottle gourd, groo...

While all is very well at the Rainbow School, I'll pause to highlight a "sister organization" supporting budget private schools in India. Gray Matters Capital and the Rockdale Foundation have an annual symposium in Hyderabad, called "Enterprising Schools." Buddies of mine from here in Palo Alto, the Hewlett Foundation and IDEO, are heading out there next week. More info is on www.enterprisingschools.com My IDEO fellas organized a whole list of very low-cost teaching aide ideas to present at the symposium. Ideas like using old newpapers to teach literacy. They put the list up on the website under "STEAL THIS IDEA" - click here for the list! (in pdf form) BEST WISHES for a successful symposium, I miss you all in Hyderabad!

The government official for the Rainbow School is the Mandal Education Officer, the MEO. He has dozens of schools, the most populated part of our district which has 1 million students total (big district!). His name is Jagan Mohan Chary. He is the most wonderful man. You can see him here, standing, in the white shirt. Other than my work with the Rainbow School, my focus is how to support public servants like Chary. But I want to do this throughout the world. There are almost 5 billion mobile phones in the world, and I hope to use SMS to reach the millions phones in the hands of public servants who seek to do good. More more on this kind of work, check out Mobile Active: http://mobileactive.org/ I miss you Chary!

Another Challenge: The State government decided that all teachers (junior teachers, too) had to pass 10th grade exams. It is very hard to find young men and women to work in a school in a slum who have passed 10th. We can find teachers who are training to pass 10th. Most of the Rainbow School teachers are training right now to take their 10th exams. But until they have a 10th pass certificate, no government salary support. No government salary support = big budget problem for the Rainbow School. (For an example of the difficulty of this exam click here .) The Good News: Our Kalpana and Vijaya Madams will try to get an exception to the rule by appealing to the MEO. And we found a temporary solution with a private donor. But it will only be for the rest of the school year. Other news: 1. We will send pictures later, but the veranda classrooms will have reinforced rain/sun shielding by the next month thanks to some American donors. 2. A lovely donation was made via Rangoo Madam:...

Rangoo Madam, our volunteer, just took the ladies and gentleman out for a nice, leisurely lunch. THANK YOU! Great way to start the school year.

The Rainbow School could not exist without the partners. These non-profit and government organizations do everything from deliver the mid-day meal to sponsor extra teachers. We are only successful with our rugged, go-to partners. We can not go it alone. Today, I want to write about Manmohan Jain and the India Literacy Project (ILP). The ILP is a volunteer group of corporate employees from all around the Hy-Tech city area. Manmohan does a fantastic job, with his staff coordinator, making sure each government school gets at least one visit each week from the ILP volunteers. They have worked at the Rainbow School since 2007, one of our longest partnerships. They provide help with scholarships, stock and help with the library, and provide mentoring alongside their usual "teach-ins." When volunteers come to teach, they use big books made from huge posterboards. The children can read along even from the back of the room. This method, developed at the Columbia Teacher's...