The Community Learning Center (CLC) is designed to provide quality education to children who have no access to formal schooling due to multiple cultural and linguistic barriers. These children come from displaced migrant families from different parts of India.
One of those families is Nadeem’s, who migrated to Bengaluru a year ago from Coochbehar district in West Bengal. Nadeem and his wife work in housekeeping at an IT company in Ecospace in the Bellandur IT hub of Bengaluru. His younger daughter Majida was under 3 years of age when we enrolled her into ‘Buds’ – our preschool program in the CLC at Kariyammana Agraharam, Bengaluru.
Along with around forty other 3-5 year-olds, Majida began to learn foundational skills in Kannada, Math, EVS and English. Based on the Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) model, the curriculum is full of activities like singing, dancing and playing while learning the building blocks of concepts in literacy and numeracy. By the time the children turn six, they will become school ready and get mainstreamed into the nearby government school.
Her elder sister Noor (9) is enrolled in the bridge learning program (‘Connect’). This program prepares children towards NIOS (National Institute of Open Schooling) certification. The children are taught by a dedicated team of hired and volunteer teachers. Weekly Dance and Sports classes are much looked forward to! Every year, all the children are taken on multiple field trips. The senior students have bi-weekly football at a nearby turf club and they attend Leadership camps as they grow into young adults.
With both parents being away at work all day, Noor is the sole care-giver for Majida during the day. During lunch breaks, she puts up with Majida’s tantrums and ensures she eats her lunch. The twin programs – ‘Buds’ and ‘Connect’ are able to support families like Nadeem’s – to earn and sustain their family life in the city, while the girls are safe, well cared for, and learning in school. The parents attend regular parent-teacher meetings at the school and are constantly in touch with their teachers on the WhatsApp groups where they get regular updates on the school activities. Nadeem wants his daughters to study further and ‘speak English’. Like other migrants, he too hopes to return home in a few years and admit his girls into a ‘big school’ there.
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