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MAY 2007
Under Construction
In our December 2007 newsletter I said "It was a great year". Well 2007 so far is even greater! We had a very nice response to our fundraising request at the end of 2006 - thank you. Then on 2/3/07 Tory put on the second, Monterey County Artists' Art Sale, this time at The Crossroads (at a space that The Crossroads very generously donated). It, was a roaring success, with help from a nice article by Lisa Crawford Watson in The Herald, a feeding frenzy of fun. In 2-1/2 hours, you generated funds to build almost 2 complete schools. Thank you again. In a couple of years we'll have our third, so get ready now.
MONTEREY COUNTY ARTISTS' ART SALE
With all of this activity and support we are fortunate to have a very active building program underway that will continue into next fall. Specifically the following projects are being built or are in the planning stages:
1) One new school in Mali is just about done (from multiple donors).
2) Two new schools are scheduled to be constructed in Mali next fall. One is funded from the Monterey County Artists' Art Sale, and one is funded from an individual - an educator who never in her wildest dreams thought she could fund the construction of a complete school (and she thanked Schools3 for the opportunity)! Wow!
3) We are also now just completing Phase I of a girls' high school in Bankura, India (a 3 classroom block). We are working with the Centre for Human Settlements (CHS) in Kolkata (Calcutta), India. I visited the CHS in 1995 and am on their board of advisors, so it is a group with which we are very familiar. The girls in Bankura are from lower castes and, for various reasons, cannot go to high school in Bankura. So this is a school for them. The girls take a vocational program after graduating from high school (put on by the CHS), so they will have specific job skills. It is a project that we like so much that we have just sent off funds for Phase II of the project (another 3 classroom block). We hope to continue funding additional phases of this project. This is a private school because the public schools are not providing the education needed. Teachers are all credentialed (tight control on teacher qualifications for public or private schools in this region of India). About half of the students cannot pay any tuition (total student population of 60 girls to begin, building up to about 300 when finished), but for the others it is about US$10 per year (a bit lower than tuition at the private schools in the Monterey Peninsula). Following is a photo of the master plan, and a couple of photos of Phase I under construction.
