At the brink of a shutdown, the students from Little Flower Upper Primary School in Kaloor in Kerala decided to generate funds for their classmates who came from an underprivileged upbringing.
Most of them were about to drop out of the institution and this initiative was seen as a plausible solution to stop the increasing number of dropouts.
Headmistress of the school, Maria Lily, spoke to The New Indian Express about the plight their school was suffering, “We were at our wits’ end and running the school had become a major problem. To keep the school up and running, I was paying the salary of teachers from my pocket.”
The strength of the school had fallen to 80 and it had led to the drying up of government funds to pay the salaries to the teachers.
Student Backed Initiative
To generate the necessary funds, the students made bookmarks and put them up for sale. When that sale became a huge success, they then went on to start an “eco-friendly” initiative to make the city plastic-free. They were given the target of making around 10 bags using discarded clothes and the cost was in the range of Rs 5 and Rs 50.
The students were able to earn Rs 3210 by the sale of cloth bags with the help of the school faculty and the students’ families.
While both initiatives were undertaken by the school, the students took it upon themselves to use a part of the money from the sales to provide ration to their financially backward classmates.
“The decision was entirely theirs and teachers had no role to play in it,” Lily remarked.
Heartening Success
These initiatives were deemed to be a huge success. It brought attention to the problem the school was facing as well as it increased the number of students coming into the school. “Today, we have 117 students and 70% of them are from migrant families,” Lily told the publication.
This noble initiative run by the students is an example of how empathy can always work wonders. It is always the smaller steps that make up a bigger movement and it happening in God’s Own Country is a cherry on top. The Logical Indian applauds the students of Little Flower School for this gesture of compassion towards their fellow classmates.
