“In addition to academic subjects, children are encouraged to participate in activities such as gardening, drawing, painting, sewing, embroidery, yoga, dance, drama, and crafts”
Sarada Vidyalayam
The school is named after Sarada, who could not fulfil her dream of going to school as she was only three years when she was killed by a terrorist bomb. The name is so appropriate for his vision because it a great place of learning for poor rural children who couldn’t afford better education due to their poverty.
The inspiration to start the school came after studying the rural children’s enthusiasm to learnand the appalling standards of the rural school children. As education is the only gateway to the human development it was decided to start the school in 1992.
The school has been providing quality education blended with human values, discipline, exposure to fine arts, crafts, and overall development of the children. All these are provided at no cost to the parents, but supported by several donors across this world. The school education shouldn’t be a burden for the poor families, the Foundation has been providing free education, books, three sets of uniforms, transportation, nutritious midday meal, milk in the afternoon, medical checkups, and medicines free of cost to all the children attending the school.
But the scenario has been changed since last three years regarding the management of the school, mainly due to COVID pandemic. During that time all schools were closed, and teaching was restricted to only online classes. Because of these changes, added expenses, inflation, loss of income, local and from other supporting organizations, and donations. We didn’t want to close the school and we have decided to charge some nominal fees to supplement our resources. The nominal fees we charge is Rs. 15,000 per year whereas the other local schools charge anywhere between Rs.55,000 to 130,000 per year. However, we offer scholarships for the students if their parents cannot afford to pay the fees. We made sure that no child should drop out of education because of this change.
The results are amazing, and the model is worth emulating because this school has achieved several milestones like, children’s attendance is almost 100%, actively participate in all the extracurricular activities, zero drop out of education (while the national average of school dropouts is about 65%) during these last 30 years.
As this is a temple of learning these rural poor children has proved their mettle and reached higher positions in the society. These achievements wouldn’t have been possible without the existence of this school. It has transformed several children’s life for good, changed parents’ perception about education, eliminated child laborers and child marriages.
As of today, we have 234 children attending from UKG to 10th class and about 60% of them are girls.