School counsellors who work far away from the city centre often have to play roles very different from their counterparts in Calcutta.
These counsellors are often confronted with the challenge of counselling parents to send their children back to school because many kids have been sent away for work, married off or are tied up with household chores.
In some cases, children who have started earning are unwilling to forgo their income for studies, said at least two counsellors working in Howrah and South 24-Parganas.
Most of these children are first-generation learners. Even before the pandemic, it took six to eight months to convince them to come to school.
The two years of the pandemic have undone whatever progress had been made, said a social worker who works with children in Budge Budge.
Schools had been forced to shut down for two years because of the pandemic and many children in urban slums, suburbs and villages had no devices to attend online classes.
“Every day we are getting four to five new cases where children are engaged in odd jobs. For a section of them, parents want them to withdraw from what they are doing and come to school but the boys have got attracted to money in their hands,” said Aniruddha Bhattacharyya, coordinator and documentation in-charge of Don Bosco Ashalayam, Howrah.
In some cases, NGOs are unable to trace many of the children, let alone get them to return to school.
“When we asked their parents, they said they had been sent off to their native place in Bihar. We can no longer trace them. In such cases, we can no longer get them back to school,” said Sharmistha Chakraborty, counsellor and area centre supervisor, Tomorrow’s Foundation.
Chakraborty works in areas like Budge Budge and Taratala.
She said that before the pandemic, too, they had to work rigorously with the children and their families.
“We would hold personality development classes with them, talk to them and gradually they would have a self realisation that they need to study. It would take us some months to mainstream them,” she said.
Now, the reopening and closing of schools have posed a further challenge, Chakraborty said.
“Some of the children whom we had convinced would tell us that you are admitting us to school but it is closed,” said the counsellor.
Some of the counsellors working in the suburbs are conducting door-to-door campaigns, trying to convince parents about the need to send them to school.
Don Bosco Ashalayam, Howrah, for example, takes the help of postmasters or teachers in the area who are held in high esteem to talk to parents.
Ebong Alap working in Piyali in South 24-Parganas has found that parents in the area are facing difficult situations.
“There was devastation caused by Cyclone Amphan and Covid that has impacted families. Mothers have been victims of domestic violence. We try to talk to parents on a case to case basis,” said Sarmistha Dutta Gupta, honorary secretary of Ebong Alap. The counselling is an initiative of Piyalir Boighar.
Recently, the West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights and Don Bosco Ashalayam, Howrah, organised a session with counsellors on marginalised children and mental health.
“Parents have to be told that they cannot keep their children away from school because that impacts their mental well-being. The counsellors working on the field identify panchayat heads or local doctors who the people listen to and who can convince them as well,” said Yashabanti Sreemany, counsellor and a member of the commission.