A number of schools supported by Asha celebrated their annual days in March and April of 2023. This was happening in full strength and a 3 year break due to Corona.

Click here to see more photos from the annual day functions.

Asha Chennai has a history of supporting Annual Day functions at the schools that we support. There was a long break in the annual day functions because of the break in education due to Corona. Even in 2022, the schools for most part did not celebrate annual days. There was an explicit instruction from the government to avoid that both to stop the spread of Corona and to focus on academics because of the reduced number of school days in 2021-22.

Schools really came out with the school day celebrations this year. We were glad to resume our support for the annual days. Asha typically sponsors prizes for the children for any competition that the school may have conducted and snacks on the day of the event. It is important for the schooling to be joyful for the children. This contributes in that regard.

Annual day functions gets the school to focus on sports and arts. Many of the schools combine such an annual day with sports day and also have competitions like lemon and spoon race, potato sack race etc. The schools also conduct various other competitions like Thirukural recital, speech competitions etc. Children are trained to sing, speak and dance for the annual day event. All these serve an important purpose in terms of a holistic education for the children. The same was observed this year as well.

Annual day functions serve another important function for the schools. It is their primary PR event to attract enrollment from the local population. In these smaller rural schools, these school annual day functions bring out everyone from the village to attend this. Everyone has a child or at least a neighbour or a niece/nephew in the school and in the small schools every child gets to perform something in the function. The school gets to showcase the work it is doing. Asha’s support typically gets highlighted as well. In particular, the following support from Asha were highlighted all the times.

• Donation of computers and teaching computer science to children.
• Excursion for the children (in schools where we sponsored it).
• Regular teacher support.
• KaradiPath program for spoken English in schools where we are conducting it.
• Stationery and other materials we have provided.

It gives Asha to establish/maintain contact with the village community and reaffirm our support for the school and the government schooling system. Typically the guests from the education department also get to hear about Asha’s work at the schools during this time.

Sangamam – Thiruvallur

At Sangamam, the following schools celebrated their annual days with Asha support.

I personally got to attend several of the school annual day functions this year. There were some interesting learnings for me.

1. I observed that there were broadly two types of annual day functions. A small one held typically in a school room itself with just the children and their parents. In functions like this myself and Srinivasan will be the only invited guests. The focus will be on the programs conducted by the children.

The other functions are much grander affairs. School organizes construction of a temporary stage and rents shamiana, chairs etc. There are 10s of guests on the stage giving long speeches, and 100s of people in the audience. The children enjoy this as well but the focus of the event becomes the guests. This typically highlights the ability of HM to raise the kind of money required to conduct such an event. At Asha we prefer the former but support the latter as well.

2. As mentioned earlier, all the schools and even the visiting BEOs highlighted the support provided by Asha and requested us to provide even more support in the coming years.

3. One of the school annual day functions that I visited was in a Panchayat reserved for SC/ST candidate for the post of Panchayat president. When I got down from the stage I was introduced to a lady as the Panchayat president’s wife. So I asked if her husband was one of the other people on the stage. Without any shame or hesitation she and the Asha teacher there explained that as it was a reserved constituency, the president really was only for name sake and he is not invited to preside at such events! I had to wonder if his being a Dalit also had something to do with it. In a couple of other functions the Panchayat presidency was reserved for women. In such cases typically the woman and her husband will be there and no one will have any doubt in their mind about who is the important person there!

The schools have been a little tentative in having the school day function after 3 years, this year as well. As we had the budget to support some more schools’ annual days, we also supported the annual day functions at 4 schools that are supported through the Amazon Explore program.

Here are some photos from these functions.

Thulasi – Villupuram / Thirivannamalai

At Thulasi, the following schools celebrated their annual days with Asha support.

I went on a visit to Thulasi schools from 23rd to 25th of March. I also managed to attend the annual day function at Nallan Pillai Petral. They had previously conducted a sports day and only the prize distribution was held on the 24th of March. Rest of the functions were attended by Dhinakaran our coordinator and Paripooranam our project steward.

Here are some photos from the functions.

Pearl – Thoothukudi / Thirunelveli

At our Pearl project, the following schools celebrated their annual days with Asha support.

While the volunteers couldn’t make it to any of the annual day functions, Asha was represented by our coordinator Murugan and our teachers.

Poorna Vidhya – Chennai / Kanchipuram

At our Poorna Vidhya project, the following schools celebrated their annual days with Asha support.

Here are some photos from the functions.