HOW YOU CAN HELP

The main deterants to quality education in this village:

• The teachers at the school are not trained teachers. They themselves undereducated, their knowledge of English varies widely and the dependability of them coming each day is fragile because they have no money to pay salaries.
  
  
• The students are unable to come on a regular basis for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they lack clothing. Sometimes they are ill or a family member is ill and they must care for them. Sometimes the dirt roads are so washed out they cannot be traveled upon by foot. Some children are heading households of younger siblings who they must care for.
  
  
• The school lacks chairs, desks, any and all types of teaching materials including textbooks, paper, pencils, etc.
  
  
• There is no running water nor electricity at the school.
  
  
• They lack a teacher housing, generally provided to teachers in Uganda to make up for salary deficits.

Our Plan for a Solution:

What is needed at this school is to establish a "learning center" where students can attend as often as possible, and take part in a student-centered instructional setting where they can work through various independent lessons. The lessons would include quizzes to determines competency and the students could independently work their way through each grade. This allows the children to learn despite irregular attendance and independent of teacher knowledge-base and stability.

Please consider sponsoring/ funding a project:

$30 - feeds all the children in the school.
If you can't feed them all year, can you feed them one day?

$100 - provides a teacher for one month.
If you can't provide for a teacher all year, can you provide a month?

Our plan also includes looking for funding sources for a water bore (a hand-dug well to supply water, estimated cost $4,000.00 USD).

Our plan also includes obtaining mosquito netting - their best defense against their #1 killer of children, malaria. This will also be hand-carried to the village children.

Can you help with one of these projects? If so, please email me and I'll forward you the specifics or donate now. - thanks, Kathie __

To: Martin Sebuliba, Director, Springs Alive School

Dear Martin,

I want to thank you again for the opportunity to visit your school and meet your teachers and the students and the families in your village. The music, dancing singing and pageantry was outstanding and we were honored to be a part of your graduation ceremony.

As promised, I have returned to the United States with a better understanding of your situation and the needs of the children in your village.

From my perspective, I would summarize the situation as follows:

You have several obstacles to a thriving and effective school including a lack of electricity, a lack of textbooks and other teaching materials, underpaid and underprepared faculty, nconsistency in student attendance, inconsistency in teacher attendance, variation in teacher's use of English, and an inability to consistently and predictably get materials and money to the site.

Therefore, I believe the most effective way to improve student learning and increase effectiveness is to move your school system to what we in the United States call, "student - centered". This has become an increasingly popular methodology here in the US to overcome many of the same issues you are dealing with there (lack of attendance, dropout rates, inconsistent teacher supply). The educational research done here in the last 2 decades has shown that student-centered schools have in fact improved student learning, student engagement, and student outcomes.

The basic principle here is to put the emphasis on the student for driving his or her own learning. The teachers (or trained adult) in the room acts more as a facilitator or coach and work one-on-one with students as needed. Because the emphasis is on student directed learning rather than teacher - centered delivery, the instruction is not affected by inconsistent attendance nor lack of trained teachers.

I would propose that we begin by setting up a list of basic competencies for each of your grade levels (or preferably, a multi-age grouping). Then we would begin to assemble a variety of student hands-on activities to teach each of the competencies. These activities would come with a small test and answer key for the teacher. The teacher then would mark off when a child passed one the competencies and they would move on to another. Once a satisfactory number of competencies has been passed, the student would graduate to the next grade level.

If this is something that is of interest to you and your teachers, I will spearhead the development of the program here in the US. We may have to concentrate on one grade level at a time. Once the activities are put together, we would need to return to your school and provide a day or two of training with your teachers, during a school term, so that they would be familiar with how to help the students engage. We could start right away in this next term using many of the materials and activities that we left there at the school last week.

I believe this would be the most effective way to advance your school and would elminate the pressure for monetary funds and / or the pressure to find and pay for registered teachers. The only obstacle might be securing the learning materials on a day to day basis.

You might be interested in knowing too, that as a result of our visit last week, we now have two side organizations running - one to bring dresses to the girls in your village on our next visit and one to purchase and bring student tables to your upper grade classrooms on our next visit.

I look forward to hearing from you and look forward to continued cooperation between us.

Best,

Kathie

Dr Kathie F Nunley
Brains.org

Can you Help Us with One of these Activities?

If you can help, please send me an Emaill (kathie@brainsorg) with the Subject Line "Uganda" and let me know what you can do.

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