Schools Where Teachers Don’t Show Up For Class, US School Children Teach "Slum Dog Millionaire"

Aug. 12, 2010 - PRLog -- Contact: John Burns/Neil Bhaskar
Ph: 609.228.5740
Cell # 609.462.0697
neilb@princetonllc.com
john.b@princetonllc.com

SCHOOLS WHERE TEACHERS DON’T SHOW UP FOR CLASS
US School Children Show up to Teach “Slum Dog Millionaire” Children in India

Three Pennington High School children left for India two weeks ago for India to teach in an afterschool program to under privileged  children in Delhi slums. In India there are many economically challenged areas where the government schools are supposed to provide free education, but facilities and resources are literally nonexistent. In a very large number of cases, even teachers do not show up for class. Children come to school; hang out and leave with little or no learning!

A large number of students who are in high school can’t read or write and have very limited basic mathematics skills.

The fathers of these children are rickshaw pullers and the mothers work as domestic help with barely a $50-60 per month income to support a family of five to eight family members! Pretty close to what was represented in the “Slum Dog Millionaire” movie.  When these children come home they get no help from their parents who themselves had no schooling. Instead they are asked to quit school so that they can be employed as child labor and help support their family.

Princeton Global Solutions (PGS) of Pennington has just donated $1,000 to Sharda Vijay Education Foundation (SVEF) which works  in conjunction with some local charity like Nirmal & Ajeet Jain Trust to provide an afterschool program for the children to keep them off the street and provide afterschool coaching in the 3Rs – Reading; Writing and Arithmetic.  SVEF is experimenting with a not-for-profit  program  which  accomplishes two things:

1.   Helps provide afterschool teaching with a couple of regular local teachers.
2.   Provides US university and high school students with the opportunity to come and volunteer to teach at the afterschool program.

With reasonable language skills in English, these children will be able to get the better paying jobs; and at the same time, US volunteers are able to learn about the local culture and the Hindi language. Therefore, this program is expected to attract non-resident Indians (NRI), who can send their kids to India to become contributing members of society while being immersed in Indian culture and language.

Students participating in this program from the USA will need to live with local families for the period of their stay in India, as foreign exchange students do.

This allows a deeper exchange at a student level; some of these relationship become long term friendships. Enclosed is a photograph of some of the children, Catherine (19), Alexander (17), and William (15) who are participating in this program from Hopewell High School of New Jersey.

Participants are encouraged to take photos of the classes, students, teachers and student letters, and a weekly log of how they spent their time and what they taught and what they learned in this project.

For more information on this effort please contact MR. John Burns, CFO for Princeton Global Solutions, LLC at 609-228.5740, john.b@princetonllc.com or Mr. Neil Bhaskar at 866.552.7779 neilb@princetonllc.com.

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Princeton Global Solutions is a Pennington , New Jersey based Management Consulting firm with a "Giving Back" to the community through educational and entrepreneurial initiatives.