Education Support to Students in the Pandemic - at Sharda English School

The students of Sharda English School came from families where student's parents worke as small scale farmers, hawkers, vendors and such jobs. Although they were economically challenged, the parents did manage to provide basic needs to their families by hardwork and labour. As we know the Covid pandemic has been unjust to all sections of society, the one's who suffered the most were those living on daily wages/income. Due to a shut down of business and regular trade for months, a lot of families of our students suffered directly and indirectly in the following ways:

1)   Some parents lost their jobs.

2)   Farmers lost their agricultural produce due to heavy rains.

3)   No income sources as shops were closed.

4)   Five of our school students lost one of their family members due to Covid.

5)   Some families were infected by corona and suffered heavy financial loses.

6)   Lack of medical facility.

7)   Most of the parents suffered mental and emotional trauma.

8)   Some parents who are in private sector were paid half salary / 20% salary / 25% salary and some unpaid for months.

9)   Online schooling - some parents could not afford to provide smart phones to their children.

10) Some students faced internet problems and could not attend online classes.

Since most of our students come from economically disadvantaged families, we would be trying to reach their basic needs of Education by:

• Enabling more students gain the benefit of online learning, which is currently not possible due to unavailability of resources for all students. We intend to buy tablets for schools that can be shared and used by students on a rotational basis.
• We would be helping some students who's families were majorly affected by paying off their school fees.

Through our intervention we want to create a student friendly space. We want to take off the barriers that are currently are in the way of learning for many children especially in low income schools, where students do not have the capacity to keep with with the digital learning.

Through our efforts we believe we will have less student drop outs. We also believe we will have a better connect with teachers and students that will give us better outcomes in areas of learning and development for our students.