Dear Mr. Jayadev, I hope you are doing well. How is your health? I hope you have fully recovered from the surgery. I hope the children at Deenabandhu are also doing well. Please convey our regards to them and that we think of them often. May I add some more action items for your thoughts and input. We can discuss these an see whether these are useful to include for future action. (1) Some workshops for teachers, where the teachers present their techniques (you have already mentioned this). The goal is to make the teachers feel involved. (2) Newsletter for teachers: this is another way for teachers to exchange information and get questions answered. The questions could be on subject matter (example questions are - "what is the difference between the lens and a mirror" which someone asked; another question was "why are waves always in one direction in the ocean"). Maybe some Asha volunteers in the US can help answer these questions. We have access to information, to libraries here. I was wondering whether this would help. The newsletter can have two sections, one for exchaging teaching methods, and another for asking questions. Maybe even a separate newsletter for LPS and HPS. Maybe a printed newsletter is too expensive? I am not sure of the costs. Maybe we should take this up a little later. (3) Some evaluation methodology for the schools, in a child-friendly manner. (we could borrow from NIAS' work, and SVYM's work). We will also come to know exactly how our intervention is helping, and the teachers will also feel a sense of achievement if there school is doing well. The 7th standard exams etc. seem to be insufficient since teachers help their students sometimes. It would be good to have our own independent evaluation. We could even think in terms of some special recognition for schools (teachers and headmasters - maybe small prizes) if their school does well after using our training. That will motivate them I think. (4) Resource center: We had discussed a resource centers where teachers and older students can come and use the experiment equipment. It would also be good to equip the resoruce cetner with a library. As you had mentioned, we could link this with the CRCs NIAS is planning. NIAS said they will send me a budget when I visited in Bangalore, but they have not yet. I will remind Dr. Vasavi about it. (5) SVYM has focused heavily on SDMC committee involvement. Maybe the social workers we have hired can go and interact with the social workers at SVYM and learn about the SDMC committee involvement there? It appears as though the SDMC committee will be in charge of money this term - Rs. 50,000 for teaching aids, Rs. 25,000 construction etc. (am I remembering correctly?). So it seems important to make sure the SDMC committees are working well this time. (6) Cultural activities - I will send you some information from what I learnt from the group in TN. If we could have such activities in the 20 schools we will be focusing on that will be wonderful. In TN that has done wonders for the childrens' confidence. Dr. Balu of SVYM was here two weeks ago. He said that in H D Kote, where they have adopted schools, teacher transfer is a huge problem. They train teachers, but then get transferrred. That has not been a problem in Chamarajanagar, has it? Teachers have been working for many years in teh same school? That is a very good thing. Dr. Balu said he will be eager to work with the Viveka Asha Yojane and share learnings from each group. We could start by our social workers learning about gettng SDMC committees involved. Warm regards, Melli