Rainbow Primary School

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, ...