Visit to Srividyashram - Vaishnavi - Summer 2007

Shrividyashram primary school is located in a small village called Aduthurai in the Tanjore district of south Tamil Nadu. The village is located 30 minutes from the city of Tanjore and the drive takes us though beautiful green paddy and sugarcane fields and the Cauvery river. As I sat there, staring at the beautiful rural scenery, I was filled with excitement – this was the first time I was visiting any of our projects and it was also the first time I was amidst such lush-green fields and clear blue water of the river Cauvery.

The school had just rolled into its daily routine as we entered it. Children were assembling class-wise for the morning assembly. Here, they said their prayer, followed by five minutes of Pranayama (a breathing technique thought to improve the mental and physical health). After a few quick announcements, they filed back to their respective classes. Shrividyashram primary school operates between 8:30am and 3:30pm. They have 372 children starting from pre-primary upto 5^th standard. Almost all classes except pre-primary have an equal number of boys and girls in the class. They have had no drop-outs so far since their inception in 2002(?). Every child gets monitored for mental, physical and social well-being all year long in addition to being monitored academically. The school maintains a detailed report of the progress of every child on a weekly basis. The children receive books, uniforms and a mid-day meal at the school. The meal is wholesome and is hygienically prepared in-house in the school kitchen. Each child pays an extremely subsidized fee to the school and the fee structure is customized according to each student’s economic background and financial stability. Shrividyashram is the only English medium school amongst all the villages within a radius of 10KM of the school. This is one of the factors, which makes the school extremely popular amongst the villagers. The school management operates 4 school buses to pick-up and drop-off children from and to their homes. The school receives funding from individual donors and some corporate organizations. Last year our chapter had funded the school towards completing the construction of one classroom of the school.

The school and its system of education are built around the Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan (PSBB) – a leading educational institution in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Mr. Swaminathan, the founder- director of the school believes that education should bring about a child’s over-all development, not just enable him to read and write. And to that effect, the school holds annual sports meets, an annual school-day where the children put up skits, dance performances and other cultural shows, and an annual science exhibition. These activities are not only targeted at the children, they also keep the parents more involved with the activities of the school. The science exhibitions also serve to give out community messages on energy and water conservation, environment friendly disposal of wastes etc.

Many features about the school seemed to stand out and catch my attention. Every classroom has its own computer and the teachers often use this as an aid to help students comprehend difficult concepts. The younger children have a dedicated audio-visual hour where they watch educational videos and this is often followed by activities that test the child’s comprehension of the video/audio clip. Every child in the school gets exposed to computers very early in their schooling. I was extremely impressed to note that a third-grader was quite proficient in using MS-Office. In fact, when I was visiting the school, the stdents were preparing for the school election and I was pleasantly surprised to see print outs of word documents being used for canvassing with in the school. The school has an extensive computer lab which was a generous gift from the employees Satyam Computers, Chennai and Infosys, Bangalore.

Mr.Swamination and his teachers try and inculcate morals and values as part of the child’s education package. As in many schools, each classroom has its fair share of teachings and sayings displayed on the walls but the teachers try and get the children to grasp these from the day-to-day life point of view during their curricular and co-curricular activities, rather than have a 30 minute moral-instructions class on it. One of the key things the children are taught is the need to save money. Apparently, in many of his meetings with the parents, Mr. Swaminathan had observed that many of these farmers had the tendency not to take their financial stability too seriously and ended up being in big debts, which often resulted in very serious consequences. He wanted to bring the children into a practice of saving money right from their early childhood. He introduced a small scheme for the 4^th and 5^th graders where each child deposits either Rs. 1 or Rs. 2 into his assigned piggy-bank, then on the last week of the month Mr. Swaminathan matches the child’s contribution for that week. The matching funds are Mr. Swaminathan’s personal contribution to the child’s saving and does not come from the administrative funds. At the end of the month, the money gets deposited into a savings-bank account to be returned to the child as he/she finishes schooling here. I was curious to know what each child wanted to do with the money. My heart swelled with joy when they are said they wanted to use it to pay their fees for their high school.

The High-school construction for which funds were requested for this year is currently under way. The Foundation has been laid and the ground-floor classrooms are almost completed. The classrooms are well planned. Apart from the regular classrooms, the laboratories and the staff-room are also to be located on the ground-floor. There are going to be bathrooms constructed separately for the boys and the girls (also on the ground-floor). The first floor of the building will have more classrooms and the library. The new high-school building is across from the currently funded primary school.