Information on Jeevanahalli and BEL schools

On 30th Aug’08 , Sugathi members visited 2 Govt. Telugu Schools. These are located in Jeevanahalli & BEL.

The details about the school located at Jeevanahalli are:

• It is a linguistic minority upper primary school (1st Class to 7th Class) run by Govt. of Karnataka. In Banagalore, there are many such schools (both Telugu and Tamil).
• Most of the children are the kids of daily labourers, construction site workers, servants and watchmen migrated to B'lore from A.P. If their parents go back to A.P, the kids will also naturally leave the school. Right now, there are 50 children in the school.
• There are 4 teachers + 1 Head Mistress.
• The school is located in a place which was a park erstwhile. It is a pucca building at one corner of the park (3 rooms - 2 being used as classrooms with partitions within them, 1 used as staff room & classroom and a small room used for storing purpose) and the remaining area in the park is being used as a play ground.
• The languages taught are Telugu, Kannada, English, Maths, Science & Social Studies. We have gone through their books, and most of the syllabus is covered as activities i.e. their text books are more like workbooks.
• We spoke to the Head Mistress and another male teacher there. They assured that they are very happy to be associated with us and are more than willing to let us help them in any way, be it teaching, conducting activities, sports or even financial help.
• Regarding when we can meet the kids, the school works till 3 PM on weekdays and till 1 PM on Saturdays. The school will remain closed on Sundays. We can use few hours of their Saturday but within their school timings.

The details about the BEL school are:

• BEL School, run by Bharat Electronics Limited., has classes from 1st to 7th Class. It was started by BEL to cater the schooling needs of the children of the employees. But unfortunately, only 12% of the employees’ children study at this school.
• The school has three media of instruction: Telugu, Kannada and English. We have visited the Telugu medium school last week, as part of our plan to do activities.
• The number of children in Telugu school is 202. 90% of the children come from the families of construction workers, daily labourers migrated from Andhra.
• Mr. Srinivas, a teacher at the school explained us that he had to visit the houses of most of the children, convince their parents to send them to school.
• This school also has got considerable % of drop outs. The reason is the same as the one mentioned in the case of Jeevanahalli school. Children will go back to their hometowns, in Andhra, along with their parents.
• A few of them do come back after some time. The school management said that it was a bit challenging to deal with the children who “return” to school. As they lag in the academics, they can not sit with their old buddies but have to go to lower class kid. The kids feel very uncomfortable to do so. The teachers will put them in higher class itself and take them additional classes in the evenings.
• The school starts at 8.30 AM and ends by 2.30 PM. It has got a library where as computer lab and science labs are being set up.
• A nominal fee of Rs.500/- pa is collected from the children and for very poor children it is totally waived off.
• A charitable trust run by Bangalore MP H.J.Anantha Kumar provides the lunch for the children. Some other donors helped the children by distributing school uniforms, bags and books.
• We spoke the HM and a few teachers over there. They are very happy to allow Sugathi to plan any activity that helps the children.

Our visits to these schools did help us in understanding the expectation of school managements and the teachers. Of course, we do not yet know what the children expect because the time we spent with them was very less.