The Sikhya experience

I do not know if some one has mentioned about Sikhya in any previous blogs but I'll do so here. In order to get our YATN kids into mainstream education the first agenda had always been to send them to a full fledged school and motivate them enough that even if they move away from this space they find new schools for themselves (maybe run by the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan !) and get themselves enrolled. In this regard we had in the first year of our functioning enrolled many of our students to the nearby Chilla school (that what our kids call it!). The outcome was initially very good, but eventually numbers reduced and only a few of our students continued on in the school. The reasons for it were mainly (as much as I can hypothesise!) that the Chilla school was Punjabi medium and had less infrastructure. Punjabi medium would have been a problem as many kids had migrated from Jharkhand, Bihar, U.P., Orrisa, Andhra Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh and that too not long ago. As far as the infrastructure is concerned, the school has a total of two classrooms for conducting classes till standard 5. Here we started looking for other schools and were helped by Anu ma'am who referred us to Sikhya - www. sikhya.org We went on to visit the school and it was everything that a good private school would be and interestingly had the specific aim of teaching kids of slums, migratory labourers etc. So they had devised special strategies to ensure the students get interested in education. Our interim agenda became to send these students off to Sikhya. The entire team of YATN participated in order to fulfil this aim. Our evening school teachers and R.A.W. (Research Analysis Wing) ensured that we could identify kids in the age group of 5-7 years and get them admitted to the preparatory class. These were a group of 25-30 kids who could be admitted. The organisation team ensured that the affidavits to be submitted to the school and the school admission forms were filled on time for school admission. The school helped YATN as it relaxed its admission criteria to 7 years for the prep class. Even the Auto Bhayiya whom we arranged for talking the kids to and from school everyday charged the least possible price per kid after learning that YATN is attempting to teach labour kids. Finally after the effort of all the YATN members (IISER M community!), and Sikhya and even Auto Bhayiya, we were able to send 18 kids to Sikhya :-) It has now been a week the kids are going to school. I urge all of us to interact with the kids and ask them about their experience (informally) and appreciate and motivate them to keep the continuity. Because in essence, Y.A.T.N. does not exist if we do not interact (in the form of evening school or otherwise with the kids!)