Students of Vidya Sagar, present and old, can now network online. The school for children and young adults with disabilities has added a section to its website where profiles of its old students are featured. When it was launched at the school 30 anniversary celebrations, held last month at its campus in Kotturpuram, this section carried 69 profiles.
It is expected to keep adding more profiles. Each of these profiles narrates a student’s life story , discusses the challenges and he/she has faced and how he/she surmounted them to realise his/her dreams.
“In the last three decades, over 300 students, spread across streams and facing various disabilities, have passed out of the institute,” says Dipti Bhatia, deputy director, Vidya Sagar.
Alumni of Vidyasagar who took up official roles in the organisation are behind this initiative to track the lives and careers of its past students. The stories also discuss the role played by parents and caregivers in shaping the lives of these students, which is expected to make for a compelling reference material on the care of people with disabilities.
“Many of the experiences are shared only by word of mouth. In time, the learning may be lost; therefore this website will help us document each journey, though very briefly,” said the concept note on the website. “We had six to 10 teams working on the website, which included the present staff. We will be adding more profiles in the months to come,” said Dipti. Poonam Natarajan, Usha Ramakrishnan, Dipti Bhatia, Mllika Rama Rao, Jayanthi Narayanan, Priya Desikan, Lakshmi Gopalakrishanan Anuradha Naidu, Suguna, Vijayashree, Radha Ramesh, Anu Shankar, K.S. Uma and Sudha Ramamoorthy were part of the team involved in profile writing and taking photographs. Other teams handled editorial, Tamil translation, video and photography and technical work. Alumni who are not in touch can email or call Josephine at 22353757 /22354785 / email id: director@vidyasagar.co.in
