School Tuition Centre
Our school tuition centre began in 2011, with small groups receiving tuition in Dabar village homes. Quickly the classes got too big and moved down into the yards, when it became apparent that a centre was needed. Tinku, head man of Dabar village and president of our sister organisation Prabhat Alloi Foundation (India), donated some family land for the purpose of building a school. When he opened the doors in that first week, 180 children came flooding through the doors.
Our tuition centre operates from 8 to10 in the morning, Monday to Friday. After that, the children go to their regular village school for lessons. Why was our tuition centre needed? Tinku always said that the children go to their school for lunch, but come to us for an education. At school they sit exams each year to graduate into a new class, but they need our tuition to progress from one year to the next. If students don’t succeed, they repeat and many drop out of the system.
In a world where boys tend to be favoured, we require that families enrol their daughters along with their sons, and have fifty per cent female enrolment. Our female principal and senior teacher provide strong role models. Our classes are taught by local teachers. Subjects include Bengali, English and Social Sciences. We operate like a school, with regular classes, morning tea, certificates for attendance and achievement, sporting carnivals and festival celebrations.
We support children from the village of Loharsol, some five kilometres away, with a fleet of bicycle rickshaw school buses for transport to and from school each day. These children had not attended school before we provided this service. Our principal says that the one thing she would like more than anything else is a team of rickshaw school buses for each village, so that all the children in the region could attend our school.
