Schools, Teachers, & Classrooms

Building the Schools, Training the Teachers | NYOF not only provides scholarships to children attending rural schools, but training for the teachers, teaching material, and school infrastructure.

Model School in Dhading
Through funds raised by NYOF from donors in Japan and NYOF's own financial support, we have built a model school in the Dhading District. The villagers contributed sweat equity, and NYOF paid only for construction expertise and material. It is the best school in the area, with well-trained teachers and good equipment. In fact, it is so popular that parents fight for admission for their children rather than having them attend the local government schools. Some children walk as long as two hours just to come to this school. Already the school is bursting its seams. Faced with so many students, the teachers are sending half the children to play in the yard while they teach the other half - then switch.

The school, which includes an excellent nursery section for 60 very young children, is a safe, nourishing place for the body and mind.

It has a library and an excellent playground, At first, it offered classes only to 5^th grade, but as of the beginning of the school year in 2006, several classrooms were added, through 8 ^th grade.

Because NYOF will not continue to support the school for much longer, we have asked them to come up with a plan for sustainability. They are in the process of doing so – either by an agricultural undertaking or another project which will generate income for the school’s expenses.



Improving classrooms | In a few schools we have visited in Nepal , the children had to sit on the bare ground (unimaginably cold in winter). But most had furniture of sorts—long, unfinished, narrow boards for benches and desks. In one classroom, the “desks” and “chairs” were piles of bricks from a local kiln.

Other "schools" consist of a dirt-floored shed from which the cow is evicted during school hours. Some villages don't have even this. With no school building, the children try to learn outdoors in the searing heat of summer and the numbing cold of winter, sitting on rice bags brought from home, as the teacher runs from one group of children to another with the whiteboard and chalk.

To meet this challenge, NYOF has been building additional classrooms, especially in the Dang District, where, as a result of our Indentured Daughters program, a couple of thousand young girls have been brought home from their servitude to attend school. Some of the schools were on the verge of collapse, with far too many kids to fit into the classrooms. We have constructed 36 additional classrooms in the Dang area to resolve this problem.

Teacher Training | Most of the teachers have had no training at all (and are craving it), and we annually sponsor a teacher-training course for teachers in these rural districts for about 100 teachers. The teachers we train pass on what they learn to their colleagues - important, since we don't yet have the funds to train all who are asking for it.

Since most of the classrooms contain only a blackboard and chalk, we also provide teaching aids to some of the schools, including vivid illustration materials, charts of the Nepali alphabet and numbers, and much more.