Center Education

Our congregation has been involved a lot of educational activities in the state of Andhra Pradesh and other states too. It was seeing an urgent need where a lot of children who are Differently Abled remained unattended we wanted to do something in the education of such children. On our study and survey of the area we found it was the children with Hearing Impaired they had no special schools and we began our initiatives that something can be done concretely for their integral growth and development. This evolved a special school for the Hearing Impaired.

De Sales Centre for Education for the children with Hearing Impaired is a pioneering venture of the Daughters of St.Francis De Sales sisters in the district of West Godavari, Andhra Pradesh. It was at the request of the Diocese of Eluru, we have extended our service in the West Godavari region. We have taken up various educational activities in the region under patronage of charitable society of DSFS Convent Society. We run school and organize awareness programs in the villages. It was such initiative from our part we noticed that there were many disabled children who are not attended to. Thus some of our sisters began to contemplate how the fate of this children can be changed and how can they be brought out of the dark rooms of families. We shared the ideas with the bishop of the diocese and he readily accepted the proposal that a school for the disabled to be started. It was in the year 2003 we began this venture in a very small way in our convent rooms in the town of Eluru. On the basis of our survey and the information available from the government and other social service organizations, we realized the venture has to be addressing to the one particular disability and thus we narrowed down to the children with Hearing Impaired.  

There upon we began the initiatives in a small way. First of all we approached the parents of such children and explained the various possibilities for such children to develop and come to the main stream of the society. The initial responses were very poor. However we began our initiative with a few children joined us and two of our sisters namely Sr.Laetitia and Sr.Regeena were trained in special education thus begun DE SALES SPECIAL SCHOOL. There after we have grown gradually. The diocese recognized our work and the bishop Late Rev.John Mulagada offered some land about 12 K.M. from the town to build the infrastructure for a special school. Since the parents usually do not bring them to the school daily and other inconvenience foreseen on account of distance and transport facility, we opted that we construct a school with boarding facility. Positively it can cater to the needs of the children better as they are with us always. We not only concentrate on their academic activities but they are also taught to do the household activities on themselves, keeping themselves clean and which otherwise the parents may not able to communicate to them properly. Hence with the help of many generous persons and those who care for these children we built a small building and shifted the school to this premises. The school today is located at Prakash Nagar, in the Grama Panchayath of Janampet, Pedavegi Mandal in the district of West Godavari. This change of place has given us more access to villages and to people in the around. Over the years many children have come to join us and we organized the curriculum according to the requirements of the Government norms.

We have today classes 1 to 10, and it is recognized by the Government of Andhra Pradesh. At present there are 60 students in the institution. They are from poor family background. After academicals, they will be sending for technical studies or vocational training after which they will be able to stand on themselves. We 10 teachers and 4 non teaching staff are trained to teach these children and take of the hostel and school. In order to fulfill the needs of the children we have to

have yet so many things to be done. We do train them in various ways especially speech therapy, auditory training, computer classes, development of skills.