'My School Kit’ initiative to help students get back to school
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:The schools have reopened. But, the classes have become ever the more challenging. The floods have swallowed up everything, washing away every bit of the study materials of the students. After the relief operations and cleaning activities, the techies have come up with just the right solution- the ‘My School Kit’ initiative.
Ever since the floods ravaged the state, the team of techies under the socio-cultural organisation ‘Prathidhwani’ has been pioneering a slew of relief activities. “During the relief activities, we could never focus on the study materials for the children. The people have lost everything. And when we spoke to the children, they said they never got a chance to save their books and study materials when the floods hit.
That spurred us to launch the initiative,” says Rajeev Krishnan, secretary, Prathidhwani.
Collection boxes have been kept in front of all the buildings in Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram and Infopark in Kochi. Techies can drop off the study materials in these boxes. The schools and those who require the study materials can place their requirements on the website-www.keralamneeds.com- which the organisation had created for coordinating the flood relief activities. “All one needs to do is post the requirement in the website. After verifying the requirement, we will deliver the required materials,” says Rajeev.
School bag, notebook, geometry box, pen, pencil, lunch box, umbrella, water bottle, plate, stationery and every other school merchandise is being crowdsourced from the employees. Students from first standard to twelfth are being covered in this initiative.
For the past three years, the organisation has been supplying school kits to a few schools in the city during school reopening time. “We could reach out to more than 1000 students in 28 schools in the city this year. So this has given us enough confidence that we can mobilise enough study materials for the children in flood-affected areas,” says Rajeev.
The campaign kicked off Monday and a flurry of requests have been received till now. “A school in Paravur has posted a requirement of plates. The plates used to serve the meals to the students got washed away. Since we have stock of the plates, the same will be send off to Paravur tomorrow. Meanwhile, two schools from Harippad has requested notebooks. Those too will be supplied tomorrow,” he adds.
Contributions
The public can also join in the initiative by contributing books and other study materials. “We are thinking of clubbing other essentials as well as we have received several queries for household articles. We are considering including that as well,” Rajeev adds.