CDSA Education

To reinforce and enhance the quality of education that students receive in local state schools, we provide tuition classes across the curriculum subject range, before and after school daily and all day Saturday.

We have six teachers and a field worker who liaise with the families in the community. In the school year 2015/16 there are 85 term time students and 105 on the Vacation Coaching Programme. The age group of students is 6 years to 16 years of age.

The State School Leaving Certificate results for the local Higher Secondary School show the dramatic increase in the pass rate from the start of our tuition groups in 2006.

A 6 week summer Vacation Coaching Programme runs in April and May each year. The main objectives of CDSA’s coaching programme are language, literacy, maths skills and personal development.

Chandra writes:
"The programme includes leadership, communication, motivation, life skills, problem solving to bring out the latent potentialities. Music, dance and drama are included as well as more light hearted activities. Daily newspapers enable the students to study current affairs, their families have no tradition of reading. State schools teach by rote. The coaching aims to get children to look, think and enquire. The project is really intended to strengthen their wings further to cross the hills. "

Special days or events are led by guest speakers or local experts.

There is an awareness of the needs of girls, who make up 60 to 65% of the students.

Teachers Jeneesh and Shreeja enable the Vacation Programme students, girls in particular, to find job oriented professional courses outside the village and the state by themselves.

Previously none of the girl students ever dreamed of finding a job opportunity, or job oriented professional course outside of the village.

With help from the Pan Asian Women's Association we have supported several Idinjar girls through a college education. Jency Raju is one of these fortunate and successful students.

Jency was illiterate when she joined one of our early tuition programmes. She attained literacy in English as well as Malayalam and went on to score the highest marks in her state school leaving exams.

After completing her college course, Jency now works in Trivandrum for an American Health Insurance company doing medical transcription.

The most important aspect of the project is orienting the students, especially girls, that there is another world on the opposite side of the hills.
A world of knowledge, skills, information and opportunities…