Last year when the pandemic started it was extremely difficult to reach out to all children and parents in the school for well-being and learning. The biggest problem that we were facing as a school was- How do we know that all children are safe? How do we make sure that every child is learning?
We have a team who was active from 2019. This was our team of School Management Committee and the Core committees . We decided to leverage the strengths of this group. We presented the problem to this group who was ready to support the school in every possible way. We created grade wise groups from this large group. Few members were assigned to each grade, systems were created and training was imparted to them to follow the systems. The teachers used to update the weekly list of low attendance and this list was circulated by the social worker on these grade-wise POC( Point of Contact) groups. The POCs followed up with these parents and resolved any issues that the parents had, they also communicated back to the social worker. The social worker in turn informed the teachers and closed the loop. This group also made well-being calls to children and at times even visited homes to ensure child safety.
The engagement of children and parents increased over the year. The school attendance increased from 45% to 74% by the end of the year. More and more parents started understanding the importance of continuity of learning and are ready to be a part of this core team. We would like to make this team more independent, develop leaders and make their work more sustainable.
This is a result of the foundation that was laid 2 years ago. One has to believe in the potential of the team they are working with, work on skill building of that team, create sustainable, automatic structures and keep motivating the team.
Starting with identifying a potential group, skill building for them, creating structures and keeping this group motivated will help.
