Kasthuri should be in School

Kasthuri came to Vanavil as a 2 year old along with her elder siblings. She is bright eyed and curious. She wins over everyone with her smile. Kasthuri is now in LKG, she has 2 brothers and a sister who are all students of Vanavil. Her family doesn’t have a home due to debt problems and are nomadic. Her mother begs on road and father is physically challenged and does not work. Being the youngest, if not in school, Kasthuri often accompanies her mom while she begs. Vanavil School works towards taking nomadic tribal children out of begging and provides them a safe space to stay and quality education. 

Vanavil is a critical crucial step for children as none of their parents have ever been to a school and are still semi-nomadic. The children come from an extremely malnourished context. We provide them breakfast, Lunch, Healthy snack and Milk to pull them out of acute malnutrition.

Vanavil School is a state of the art activity based special school for marginalised children. We have 100 children from KG to Fifth standard.

Classes LKG, UKG and grade 1 are in a Montessori environment. For classes 2-5, we follow a thematic learning process with students doing a project around a chosen theme every term. They do field visits, interviews, watch videos, do online research and put up their learning as Maps, models, skits, songs and booklets.

We follow the Jodo Gyan program of inculcating number sense as our Math module and kids learn through games and real-life incidents to connect them to mathematical problems.

Vanavil follows up on the children in order to wean them back from begging, feed them thrice, provided them a safe space to stay and takes care of their health needs apart from educating them through child-centred innovative methods. Also, as most crucial skills are learnt in the ECE and primary classes Vanavil school equips the children from extreme backgrounds in a way that they can compete equally with the rest of the children from middle school onwards.

• We have so far supported 520+ nomadic tribal children through our School
• We have created a safe, happy and child friendly space for nomadic tribal children in Nagapattinam
• We have curbed child begging and child marriages in the community
• The school enrolment rate has increased from 0% to 100% among the nomadic tribal population
• We have sent 64 nomadic tribal students to higher education so far
• Our students are now working as IT Professional, News Channel Reporter and as Teacher