One of the important component while working with mentally challenged is parent involvement. To encourage and motivate parents we need to have frequent interactions with parents and amongst parents also. And one of the means is parent meeting. We at Sandnya have always accorded importance to parent meetings. It takes lot of effort and and persuasion on the part of school management to ensure good parent attendance for these parent meetings. It is because of these consistent efforts that normally we have reasonably good number in these meetings. We did have the first parent meeting of this year on 24th July'10. This meeting was held in Madhav Nagar community hall which we get for a nominal charge. The number of parent was at 45, but considering both parents attending and or with other close relatives, this number was 90 in total. I feel this is a reasonably good number. The agenda of the meeting included, introduction of new parents and they were 5. This meeting was fully conducted by our Principal, Mr.Alok Dwivedi and considering his age and experience he did fairly well. Of course he has to improve a lot, but the good thing is he is improving and trying to learn also. I am sure in couple of years he will have a good hold over these meetings. The second point on the agenda was general instruction for parents which of course was from Principal. After this two parents were given chance to speak on any point they wished to convey. One of them was Mr. Kubawala, his two sons are mentally challenged and are in our school. Kubawalas is the courageous couple and manage there sons with lot of love, affection and involvement in them. He talked about how they manage two sons. Though he could not speak much , it being his first time to speak, but I am sure his talk though short will help motivating few other parents.
The other parent was Mr.Shrivastav, his 12 year old daughter is mentally challenged and autistic. He talked about parents helping school management in various initiatives. He also referred about parents moving there residences in Butibori near the school campus. He said this can be done in small group and in a phased manner.
After this I was asked to talk on recent activities of our organization. I did mention about open employment of three of our students in the company called Star Circlip based at Butibori. I also informed about the Agarbatti re packing unit which we have started about three months back. I said the success of this re packing unit will depend on our selling capacity and I appealed parents to share this responsibility. Though some of the parents are already supporting but many have not yet started on this. I know it will take some time to catch up the momentum.
Mr. Alok then briefed the parents on the summer camp we held for our selected students in the month of May,10 and he did this through power point presentation. This is a new initiative we took this time for the parent meeting. Firstly, being audio visual, interest of parents in the meeting was good and secondly, we could show them the activities of summer camp and the effort level and involvement of our staff and management. Alok did this fairly well. In the last, our Chairman, Dr.RM Uttarwar spoke for five minutes. The meeting was called of with coffee break.
By: Navin Deshpande, Secretary, SSS
email: navindesh@gmail.com
website: www.sandnya.org
No comments:
Post a Comment