Given the rise in both digital divide and gadget addiction as well as emotional disturbances and unwanted behaviour among children who have missed one-and-a-half years of school due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Madurai Corporation is reintroducing its Happy Schooling (HS) project in a more evolved manner to provide complete emotional support to students and help them streamline their academic life.
“Many families have slipped into economic struggle, anxiety and depression or lost their loved ones and it won’t be easy to bring back the children from these families to proper schooling,” Corporation Commissioner K.P. Karthikeyan told The Hindu. Gadget-dependency has changed their habits and made them tardy, while many domestic situations have turned violent, he added.
Happy Schooling 2.0 is aimed at building the mental strength of children, teach them to face fear and failure and shed inhibitions to share their problems in order to find workable solutions. For this, like in the first round, M.S. Chellamuthu Trust & Research Foundation has collaborated to train teachers to promptly identify any attention-related problem due to emotional trauma.
Mr. Karthikeyan said 64 headmasters of Corporation schools have been groomed as master trainers during the past months. They, in turn, will train and prepare schoolteachers on how to engage students who have got addicted to technology during the stay at home and also extensively help those who lagged behind in curriculum due to their inability to attend online classes.
Till the government announces reopening of schools, the Corporation is using the time to train all the teachers and also take refresher courses, if necessary. When the schools open, teachers will be in a state of preparedness to identify and handle emotional disturbances, if any, among children and take guidance from MSCT&RF counsellors.
Happy Schooling phase I was launched in 2018 in two dozen higher secondary schools. The teachers were trained to push the confidence levels of the children in general. The programme ran successfully till COVID-19 struck. The trust continued to hold Zoom meetings to keep the teachers’ training sessions going.
“Post-COVID, there are more people suffering from depression, which is impacting the quality of their family lives. That is why we thought of implementing Happy Schooling in a new version to help the children be more resilient to any adversity,” said Mr. Karthikeyan.