A Helping Hand to Rural Public School in Sri Lanka

Abstract

Public schools located in rural areas in Sri Lanka seem to be neglected and both educational resources and infrastructure facilities are extremely poor in most of these types of schools. This project is an interventional project carried out in a rural school located in Moneragala district with the aim of supporting to improve education and wellbeing of the students learning in the selected school. Few major issues were identified including inadequate infrastructure and sanitary facilities, poor road accesses, inadequate staff, non-availability of quality and adequate amount of reading materials and nonexistence of School Health Programmes. Few interventions were applied to rectify few prioritized issues which investigators make intervene. Applied interventions successfully improved the problems prioritized. Students and the staff members were very satisfied about the intervention. However, study found that major interventions are required at the national level to rectify the issues identified. Nevertheless, such simple interventions can be applied by any organization and or individual level to help education and wellbeing of the future generation in Sri Lanka. rural children. Most children have to contribute to family income. Most parents in these communities cannot afford the education of their children [5]. Some schools have no drinking water and sanitary facilities, lab facilities, electricity and the communication facilities are not available. Road accesses to most of these schools are very unsatisfactory. Some researchers have found that wild attacks are common in the schools located in Northern and North eastern provinces. Most of them are underfunded and difficult in fulfilling basic requirements required for the education. Teacher shortage is severe and skilled teachers turn away from rural schools due to lack of amenities mainly unavailability of quarters. Rural students frequently have high dropout and low level of reading and numeracy due to these issues. Moreover, the student performances are low in stated provinces. As many studies highlighted a few challenges such as lack of robust national policy, unplanned policy changes done by the political leaders, politicization of recruiting procedures and inability of identifying real needs of the country which hinders the attempts taken by the relevant authorities [6].