Independence day celebration at BVP

BVP students celebrated Independence Day with great enthusiasm.

The program began with flag hoisting, which was followed by students performance. The enthralling Marathi desh-bhakti geets by children was much liked by all of us. More than 150 children gathered for the celebration.

Captures of the day:

 If there's a will, a real determination within to give back to the society, then there is a way...Sant sir, founder of BVP addressing the teachers. Volunteers:Ashish Balure, Vijayraj Kamat, Nidhi Singh and Deepak Sharma

Weekly meeting minutes -- 8/12

Overall:

·        Work is increasing. Need more people in Kalyan. Please look – all

·        Can nidhi take on the social media maintenance?

·        Update school website with team details

Weekend activity planning:

Sulbha madam to send plan by tomorrow. Vinod will review and have rework done – 8/14

Is Shashi joining?

Reading skills improvement - Ashish

·        Talked to Sulbha ma’m. 8 students. Across standards. Most do not know to identify letters

·        Define goals based on reading speed and standard. – 8/19

·        Figure out the method to be used – 8/22

Computer training for teachers – Vijayraj

Varsha has requested for computer training. Will work with Rashmi

Process excels implementation – Vinit

No updates yet. Dates pushed.

Student needs funding – Vinod

Vinod working on this. Collection might start from 8/14

General website idea – Vijayraj

On hold. Let’s see if we get people who can work on it. Sahana to get back from her cousins

Equipment procurement – Vinit

Equipments identified. Quotation to be obtained

Chrome book procurement – Vijayraj

We are getting 10 chromebooks. Its possible to install windows too. Sahana to explore

English improvement – Vijayraj

Vijayraj to talk to sunita and explore. See the way forward

Key meeting after a long time

Agenda for 8th august, 11:30 am:

- Meet Varsha madam. Understand her goals.

- Sulbha madam: Get exact list of help and activities from needed by school

- Sulbha madam: Get list of school repairs and quotations 

- Sulbha madam: What is the plan to spend 2.5 lakh grant, and building toilet? Cost? Dates?

- Gaikwad sir: Verify if teacher's attendance and student attendance is being tracked. Any problems?

- Gaikwad sir: share score tracking and sylabus tracking excel(vinit and pratik)

- Vijayraj: Talk about student needs excel and plan. Vinod to get updated excel from gaikwad sir before the meeting. 

- Vijayraj/Vinod: Talk about securing chrome books if we get them

- Sulbha madam: Discuss about leveraging Vinod's friend for teaching maths/science

MoM(please let me know if timeline does not work):

- All agenda items covered except score and syllabus excels, since that is still WIP. Vinit and Pratik working on it as planned

- Student needs: Excel is ready. Vinod to calculate thank you card printing cost, design is ready, recalculate needs and start process to ask for funding. What donors see: student needs with detailed breakup(our excel) What they give: money for as many students as they want to sponsor. What they get: Thank you card with their photo, students photo, and contact number

- Availability excel shared with Sulbha and Varsha mam. They will now work on detailed activities. First up will be pratik on 22nd

- Reading skills: Ashish working on defining goals as planned. Will need a plan first. If that leads to contention for volunteers, will need to discuss with Sulbha mam, prioritize and replan as needed.

- HM expectations: Had a talk with Varsha mam around new expectations as HM, challenges she might face, bare minimum(4 process excels) etc. 

- Varsha madam has requested for computer training. Need someone to volunteer. or find one

- Governemnt has started initiative to capture all school and student details online. Extremely good. School administration completely busy working towards 15th august deadline.

- Quotations for infra repairs and more technology equipment in progress. 

Party time!!! And some serious talk

It was party time on 27 June 2015. To celebrate the 10th grade success!!

There were almost 65 attendees, with the students being 24 :) The staff, Giant's group members, quite a few Deloitte folks, Deepak(from Kalyan) and Nidhi(from Andheri!!!) made it to the party. Was all the more engaging.

Before the party, we discussed the 4 new operational processes being introduced with the primary teachers in order to get their buy in and commitment

The net connection is finally up!!!

The dongle was bought quite some weeks ago. But getting a SIM registered in the school's name was going on since a long time. Finally Gaikwad sir has done it. Online form filling is on for 11th standard using the dongle and lap top, as I type!!

My own work becomes a lot easier, since I can communicate with Gaikwad Sir over email. Else every Excel sheet update needed a week's cycle time using USB sticks!! :(

Better late than never!!

Introduction of new processes using computers:

Following operational processes are in the works:

• Students' Attendance tracker: WIP already. Gaikwad sir will make entries. Aim is to analyze patterns, focus on needed students
• Teachers' attendance tracker: WIP. Primary teacher's attendance is weak. Tracking will help quantify the issues and focus on the right gaps. Taking leaves is fine, but the aim is to plan backups so that teaching plans are not impacted
• Syllabus tracker: To teach in a planned manner, and keep track of portion completed/lagging. 
• Scores tracker: To track students scores

All the above will help answer questions like: Which subjects to students lack in? Is it correlated to attendance? Do some teachers lead to bad performance despite good attendance?

This will help us narrow down and focus on the right problem

Secondary teachers are open to these processes anyway. Need to do a meeting with the primary teachers to get their buy in on these processes. Mostly on 19th June

Important meeting for start of Academic year

Many important things were discussed on 13 June 2015.

Sulbha Madam and 3 other secondary teachers came in. Ashish Balure a friend from Deloitte also came in. Meeting lasted for more than 1.5 hours - and many points were discussed

Minutes:

Party!!!
To celebrate the 92% pass rate of the students in 10th standard. Tentatively on 27th June, 5 pm.

What did we do right? 
How come the radically improved result this year? So that we can repeat them next year. the following top points came up:

• Focussing more on chapters that have more weightage marks wise in the exam paper
• Children gain seriousness towards end of November. Use this to revise, reinforce the important chapters
• Good attendance has been found to be correlated to good performance. 
• A conducive home environment is a very big factor. And is lacking in many cases

Learning points for upcoming year:
Staff to pick the 'low attendance' students. I can talk personally to them and their parents and set expectations
Assign "Check in" volunteers to students. These will be successful professionals who's job is to simply call upon a kid's house and check what's going on. The hope is to make the parents more involved and responsible for the student's learning.

Introduction of new processes using computers:

• Students' Attendance tracker: WIP already. Gaikwad sir will make entries. Aim is to analyze patterns, focus on needed students
• Teachers' attendance tracker: WIP. Primary teacher's attendance is weak. Tracking will help quantify the issues and focus on the right gaps. Taking leaves is fine, but the aim is to plan backups so that teaching plans are not impacted
• Syllabus tracker: To teach in a planned manner, and keep track of portion completed/lagging. 
• Scores tracker: To track students scores.

All the above will help answer questions like: Which subjects to students lack in? Is it correlated to attendance? Do some teachers lead to bad performance despite good attendance?
This will help us narrow down and focus on the right problem

Secondary teachers are open to these processes anyway. Need to do a meeting with the primary teachers to get their buy in on these processes. Mostly on 19th June

Girls toilet:
Giants group is ready to fund the material cost, I can fund the labour. But getting the land approval from the slum dwellers is proving to be a challenge. This has been a key factor for the school. It's a pain that now we have the money but not the land!! Something that the school has to sort out themselves.

Needy students list:
Sulbha madam to provide updated list to Gaikwad Sir. Excel list to be ready by Wednesday

Internet dongle:
Gaikwad sir finally got the dongle working. The school now has an internet connection!!

Career counselling session:
There is a plan for Ashish Balure to conduct a career counseling session. It came up that the last date for online form filling is 15th June!! so we might be too late. Anyway, we tried to come up with a pamphlet to increase online form filling. Will it work? we dont know. Are we too late for counselling session? We dont know. Need to see