Sekoly Kintana: Fund the Whole School

Every time our students come back from vacation, we get high fives at the gate, and children we run into around Fort-Dauphin during the break ask when they can come back. That is the school we are building: serious, joyful, and here to stay. We are raising $50,000 in general funds by Giving Tuesday, December 1, to keep building it.

How we Shine

Sekoly Kintana (Star School), is a trilingual Montessori school in Fort-Dauphin, teaching in Malagasy, French and English. Children learn to read first in the language they know best, because reading is its own skill. A child who reads well in Malagasy and learns to speak French can read French too. We teach Malagasy as what it is: a language with its own literature, oral tradition and ohabolana, worth mastering on its own terms.

Most classrooms in our region have 35 children and one teacher. We keep one adult for every eight children. That ratio is what lets a guide notice that a child knows her sounds but gets stuck on symbols, and try something different the next morning. It is why, when a boy told us he didn't know what to do with his equivalent fractions worksheet, we didn't explain it. We asked what he had tried. He asked for the golden beads, laid out sets of fifteen, and worked through the rest of the page on his own.

Children here also pour their own water, set tables, care for their classroom, take karate and PE, and do project based learning through an integrated STEM program. Practical life is part of the curriculum, and so is responsibility. Since last year, we have tracked every child's starting point and progress in reading, language and math, because we want evidence of what works, not impressions.

At Sekoly Kintana, a four-year-old can spend twenty minutes building words with a moveable alphabet in Malagasy, and nobody interrupts her. An eight-year-old who arrived last August without knowing a single letter or sound is now reading. A seven-year-old who came to us from a French-first school and who was struggling to learn to read, went back to reading in Malagasy, then French, and started English this year. A few of our oldest students have begun self-study in other languages, including Portuguese, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish.

Last year, a $4,000 grant brought an experienced Montessori trainer to live on site and work beside our team for the full school year. She paid her own travel. By June, our Sounds and Shapes reading program ran in Malagasy and French as well as English, our assistants were guiding behavior by invitation instead of correction, and our math presentations were clearer and more consistent.

This September we moved into separate classrooms for the first time. Our 3 to 6 class has three adults and 16 children, with room for 24. Our 6 to 9 class has two adults and room for 16. Our 10 to 13 class has two adults and room for 12. We hired and began training staff ahead of the students we know are coming, because good guides take time to grow. For two years our classes shared one space and one set of materials. Now they carry materials back and forth between rooms, and we need more tables, stools and shelves. Our new readers have also finished every book we own, and there is no bookshop in Fort-Dauphin.

We pay our staff fair, fully declared salaries (with social benefits and tax). Families pay tuition, and families on scholarship contribute between 3 and 50 percent of it based on income. One in four of our students is on a partial or full scholarship and we would like to increase that number. During our growth phase, tuition cannot cover the true cost of running a school like this, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

Our long-term aim is to become a lab school: a place where teachers from across Anosy come to observe, train and take these methods back to their own classrooms.

Why general funds

We are deliberately not raising money for one neat project. Schools do not run on isolated projects. They run on salaries paid on time, books that clear customs, a roof repaired before the rainy season, a water bill, a gas bottle for the cantine, a guide's training, and a family whose income drops halfway through the year.

Some of these costs are easy to establish in advance. Some are not. For the last two years we've put off the "least" urgent of our expenses; however, overtime, even those items are becoming urgent. General funds let us respond to what is actually happening in our classrooms, not what looked most appealing in a proposal last year. We are the people closest to this work, we know what it costs, and we will use every dollar where the children need it most.

Closing ask

Give any amount toward our $50,000 goal by December 1. If you want to be part of this for the long haul, commit $1200 a year (or $100 per month) for three years, and join the First Fifty, the group of people who believe in what we do and curious to understand our challenges and philosophy.