Slap Stress

Five members of a family in Mumbai are on a mission to provide an online space to schools that do not have the resources to spare. Part of a campaign to provide academic help and counselling for Class X students and their parents to manage exam-related stress, it also involves measures to assess stress levels in students and organize special interactions with teachers to deal with roadblocks in the Class X examination, the first crucial milestone for students.

A counselling centre has been roped in.

The idea of providing internet access to schools across the state was the brainchild of high school mathematics teacher Nitin Jathar, an engineering graduate. Nitin understood the significance of technology for present day schools, which led to the birth of ssconline.in. His brother Amit handles the administrative side of the campaign. Their cousins Vishal Kulkarni and Vaibhav Joshi take care of server management and technical support. Amit's wife Rajshri is behind the artwork of the website.

The group, which launched the campaign last month in presence of Adman Bharat Dabholkar and IT expert and Marathi writer Achyut Godbole, plans to give four pages on the website free to each school.

"True to the concept we had in mind, a large number of schools that contacted us are from small towns. They need a window to the larger world, which the internet provides. There are also some schools in Mumbai that do not have enough resources to have a website of their own but need an online presence platform," said Amit.

"There were some schools that had sites of their own but defunct ones. In some cases, schools had not updated databases since 2007," he said.

The site tries to provide an e-learning portal for Class X students, in the form of online guides for major subjects. These are presented in a summarized format. The idea is to simplify the process of preparing for the crucial exam and removing fear in students," Jathar says.

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