Rishi Valley educational programme currently provides education for more than seven hundred local village children. Fifteen satellite schools have been constructed to date. Each village provides land for its satellite School, and the community gives whatever help it can in constructing a rustic building site, with one classroom and a storage space for teaching materials. The grounds are landscaped for water conservation and surrounded with fruit-bearing trees to create a hospitable atmosphere for learning. Classes are 'vertically grouped,' with children of various ages and abilities sitting together to study one or several subjects individually or in co-operating learning groups. Children learn from collection of study cards that the teacher has learned to make by hand in the course of her training course. The teacher guides students through the material, which breaks down the learning process into a series of graded steps.
Students at the schools are provided with a nutritious breakfast. Two doctors regularly visit the schools, providing medical checkups for students and residents of the village.
Satellite Schools serve as resource centers for their villages, offering adult education classes at night, hosting village entertainment, conserving local medicinal plants, distributing seeds and saplings, housing a small collection of books, and providing a place for community meetings and discussion groups. Literacy has spread throughout the villages as adults and children use the same facilities and materials for their own basic education. Mothers have formed committees that oversee the running of the school, take charge of breakfast preparation and keep accounts; a few members, having acquired the necessary skills, also substitute instructors in the regular teacher's absence. Community participation extends to landscaping the school grounds and cultivating trees and plants that provide fuel, fodder, fruit and medicinal herbs for common use. This mixture of conservation and education tap into deep traditional associations between learning and forests, which benefit the whole village. To revive these ancient associations, each of the rural schools carries a Sanskrit name with the suffix 'vanam,' meaning 'grove'.
Students of the satellite schools do extremely well at the public examinations conducted by the state education department. Education is now valued by the village community; girls are sent to school and as a result the drop out rate in these satellite schools is extremely low.
How much does this cost?
The total annual expenditure on all Rural activities is about $35,000.
How do you build this?
They have designed an education kit for broad application in the Indian context, including situations where qualified and experienced teachers are not available. The material, which covers language, mathematics and environmental studies, 
is up-to-date, framed in the local idiom and illustrated by gifted artists. It breaks down the learning process into a series of concrete and manageable steps. Interwoven into the text are values that nurture the sense of beauty, encourage tolerance for other cultures, and promote regeneration of the environment. Each kit contains about 1500 laminated cards to be shared by many children. The cards are designed to withstand at least three years of hard use. With maximum sharing among students in a larger village, one kit could serve as many as one hundred students in at five different grade levels in three subjects for three years, reducing the cost of educational materials to as little as one fifth of the average cost of textbooks. And there are additional long-run economies because study cards can be replaced individually when they wear out.
What is the reach of the program?
The educational programmes developed at Rishi Valley have been adapted for use in several thousand schools, in the tribal areas of Andhra Pradesh, in the neighboring states of Kerala and Karnataka and in Uttar Pradesh. Versions of the education kit are now available in Telugu and Hindi
What is the next step?
Their funding needs have two components. Funds are needed to make the satellite schools self-sufficient. One thousand US dollars is sufficient to meet the annual needs of one satellite school. Ten thousand US dollars will support a satellite school in perpetuity.
Funds are also needed for the Teacher Training, Reforestation and Medical Programmes that the School runs in the countryside. An eye-care center that is presently being planned would among other benefits prevent incidents of blindness due to vitamin deficiencies.
If you are interested in donating to the Rishi Valley Rural Education Program or other above mentioned programs, you can contact them by mail at Rishi Valley School, Rishi Valley, Chittoor District. A. P. 517352 India. (Phone/Fax: 08571-68622/68582, e-mail: rishivalley@yahoo.com)
Who are they, and what are they doing?
