About Child Rights
Child Rights are the human rights of children with particular attention to the rights of special protection and care afforded to minors. The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) defines a child as “any human being below the age of eighteen years unless, under the law applicable to the child, the majority is attained earlier.” Children’s rights includes their right to association with both parents, human identity as well as the basic needs for physical protection, food, universal state-paid education, health care, and criminal laws appropriate for the age and development of the child, equal protection of the child’s civil rights, and freedom from discrimination on the basis of the child’s race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, disability, color, ethnicity, or other characteristics.
Child Rights Week at Swapnopuron
Like every year, this year too Swapnopuron will be celebrating Child Rights Week from 14th November to 20th November, starting with Children’s Day. This Children’s Day, Swapnopuron will reach out to 700 children in the remote island of Hingalganj (near Sundarbans). The week-long event will include Prabhat Pheri where children will be participating with placards highlighting various child-centric issues such as Child Abuse, Child Marriage, and Child Rights to create awareness among the common populace of Hingalganj; Bookfair Exhibition in association with Oxford Subscription Company to create and foster intellectual development among the children; Book release on Nutrition for Children by Dr. Shibani Chakraborty, a Nutritionist, and ex CDPO; Yoga Competition to create awareness on proper and healthy nutrition of children among the local people; Storytelling Competition to enhance & develop creative imagination skills; and a cultural programme at EZCC with West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights (WBCPCR) where the children of Swapnopuron school will be participating along with the children of other schools.
Swapnopuron Welfare Society: The Journey So Far
The journey of Swapnopuron Welfare Society started in the year 2012 with the highly motivated, dedicated and technically qualified philanthropic personalities. The organization is a registered society under Societies Registration Act (1961) and having certificates of 12AA and 80G for the income tax exemption.
Satarupa Majumder, Secretary, Swapnopuron Welfare Society says, “We would like to say unhesitatingly that organization has been working in the field of primary education, protection, health & nutrition of the future citizen (child) from all sorts of abuse with the support from the community in North 24 Parganas District. Swapnopuron runs an English medium primary school at Hingalganj to promote education system among those children.”
“We had conducted a program for the promotion of menstrual hygiene for adolescent girls. As we all know, in today’s day and age, it is extremely important to understand the necessity to maintain menstrual hygiene and yet the vast majority of women in Rural India are neither equipped with the proper resources nor enabled with the proper knowledge to do so. This program is a crucial part of our agenda and we try to reach as many women as we can and make them aware about hygiene and nutrition. At Swapnopuron Shishu Siksha Niketan, the focus is not just on textual knowledge but also on extra curriculum activities like singing. dancing and drawing and yoga”, says Satarupa.
Swapnopuron Shishu Shiksha Niketan: Helping Young Buds to Bloom
An English medium, pre-primary & primary school up to Class IV, run by Swapnopuron Welfare Society at Katakhali village, Hingalganj Block (near Sundarbans) in North 24 Parganas District of West Bengal, the school is funded through donations from patrons and with nominal fees from students.
Swapnopuron works in the field of Child Education and Child Protection in Hasnabad and Hingalganj blocks under North 24 Parganas District of West Bengal. As part of its Educational Programme, the pre-primary & primary school was set up in the year 2012 with an aim to fulfill the basic educational needs of the children of its immediate local community at Katakhali village and adjacent areas.
To ensure quality education, Swapnopuron puts a huge emphasis on the teaching-learning methods. The teachers are provided with different kinds of training on pre-primary and primary teaching methods to ensure and impart better education to the students; their training programmes involve a lot of activities that are crucial in the pre-primary and primary teaching-learning methods and their significance in the motor development in children. True to being an English Medium school, various communicative English workshops are organized for the teachers to enhance their fluency in speaking and writing skills in the language so as to impart better education to help the students in the language.
The school started as an Anglo-Bengali medium school bringing education to the children belonging to the underprivileged section, from pre-primary to class IV. Since 2016, it has been working as an English medium school to prepare the students to compete and bringing them to become a part of the mainstream. A rare of its kind in a remote island where the project is undertaken and located along the serene banks of river Ichhamati in village Katakhali, the broad objective behind the establishment of this school was to facilitate the local children with quality education. Kathakali village and the adjacent areas were suffering from the paucity of schools as the local Government school is far from its immediate areas and also devoid of minimum facilities. Thus, the establishment of a school was the felt need of the community to develop knowledge seeking behaviour among the children of the locality who were mostly the first generation learners. As per the record of the admission of the educational year 2017-18 this school has a total of 140 students.
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