Remedial Education
JMC has been working with the children of Madanpur Khadar village for the last 20 years. The motivation has been to open opportunities for the children from economically marginalized families. It is towards this end that JMC began the RE and Library programmes at its Centre.
Everywhere, children are facing huge uncertainties about their future because of the intense competition. Our effort is to engender self-confidence in them to face this future; to nurture these young minds to enable them to blossom in the future, notwithstanding all the constraints they face.
Apart from Madanpur Khadar village, our Centre also caters to children from Rajasthani Camp, Shram Vihar, Priyanka Camp and other JJ colonies of Sarita Vihar and its neighbourhood.
Besides the RE programme, the Centre implements a Library programme for children of grade 1st to 6th in an effort to imbibe the reading habit in them. Many of the younger siblings of our RE programme attend the library.
RE programme during the pandemic April 2020-March 2021
The 2020 pandemic brought its challenges to the RE programme. In an effort to meet this challenge head on, the staff of JMC began virtual meetings, at least twice a week. The plan was drawn up for virtual classes.
However, the first constraint was reaching out to the children, given that they are mostly from families that did not own smart phones. The JMC staff and teachers called every child registered with the Centre and identified those with smart phones. They then made groups of children living within reach of one another around one smart phone for each group. The children had to be trained to use the phone to receive their virtual lesson, and it was an adventure!
In order to motivate the children to make this effort, the JMC staff began the adventure with painting classes. The children took to it with excitement and soon were showcasing their attempts over the mobile screen. This provided an impetus to the children’s enthusiasm and soon, nearly 50 percent of the students were hooked on to their virtual classes.
With the situation easing a bit, the Centre opened its doors to physical classes from 18th May 2020, for those children who had no access to mobiles. So, a couple of children each from 9th and 10th classes were called in. At the same time, we kept up the online classes.
Finally, physical classes were resumed while strictly adhering to the COVID-19 protocols advised by the government. It had truly been a unique and critical time for all.