Aththivaram, a community services initiative by the Rotaract Club of Wellawatte was initiated to encourage and educate the students who sit for their G.C.E O/L examinations but yet are unable to attend private tuitions due to low income of their families. As the saying goes “The main hope of a nation lies in the proper education of its youth”, secondary education plays a vital role in each and every student’s life. Even though Sri Lanka has achieved near universality in youth literacy rate, school enrollment and primary education completion as per the reports of the United Nations, Improving the quality and relevance of education, increasing access to higher and vocational education still remains as challenges. Therefore, in order to be a part of developing the quality education in Sri Lanka we the members of Rotaract club of Wellawatte started this as our pilot project.
In order to have a strong beginning for this project, we conducted a motivational session on the 16th of September 2020 in which a past pupil of St.Anthony's TMV, Mr. Vinixan spoke about how he successfully completed his O/Ls and A/Ls with good standards and how he was able to overcome the socio – economic challenge of the community.
Conducive to seek viability on the idea of this project, we conducted after school classes for 5 main subjects namely Science, Mathematics, English, Tamil and Commerce. We commenced our first Aththivaram class on the 22nd of September 2020 with the participation of 46 students. In order to encourage students to turn up for classes we gathered stationery from the general public and the Rotaractors to provide them the necessary items required. Rotaract Pearl Island played a major role in donating most of the stationaries.
Thereafter as we were continuing to conduct the classes each week, we were immensely affected by the island wide lock-down due to COVID 19 second wave, in order to overcome the above, we shifted the tutoring sessions to virtual platforms which were a huge challenge faced by both our volunteers and immensely by our students due to limited access to internet as well as smart devices. Yet the situation was managed and we conducted online classes until we switched back to physical classes during the first week of February.
The hard work of the students and the volunteers paid off when all the students successfully sat for their G.C.E. Ordinary Level examinations.