Student Committee at Brookhouse School

Posted: 19 August 2018

School:

Brookhouse School, Kenya

Number of students on the committee:

15

Leadership structure of the group:

The committee has one chairperson and one secretary. It has two representatives from each class in the year 12 year group, and additional members to support.

How often does the committee meet:

The committee meets once every week

What is the core function of the committee?:

The committee is in charge of organizing fundraising events, donations and all initiatives leading up to the year 12 residential service programme. As the committee has representatives from each class, it is meant to coordinate all activities started by year 12 students, which are meant to contribute towards the year 12 service learning project.

How often does the committee communicate with the wider student body/school:

The committee usually calls on the support of the wider student body once a month, though this changes on a need basis.

Recent initiative:

The Student Committee at Brookhouse School in Kenya developed a learning intervention programme to support local children with hearing impairments.

The Brookhouse Student Committee identified a learning gap in hearing impaired children and recognized the need for additional learning and communication support for these students. Student Claude Mulindi was also concerned about the stigma in Kenya surrounding hearing impairments and wanted to combat this.

Life is pretty tough for everyone in rural villages in Kenya,” says Claude “But it is even more challenging for the deaf as they have little or no support for their disability and often face intolerance from their society. We wanted to ensure the deaf children were appreciated as equals. For our anniversary challenge project we aimed to provide the deaf children with better experience of the basic right that is education.”

As a starting point, the Student Committee initiated an inter-schools discussion at the Global Issues Service Summit (or GISS) conference in Nairobi in February 2017. “This motivated us and students from other Nairobi schools to initiate activities to support the hearing impaired in rural schools around Kenya.” says Staicy Wairimu.

We knew one of the greatest hurdles to a better understanding of the deaf children was our difficulty in communicating with them.” explains a student “So, we decided as the Year 12 class at Brookhouse to undertake a sign language course which saw 100 students learn the beginners to intermediate Kenyan sign language curriculum, equipping them with lifelong communication skills.”

This course lasted for 6 months and allowed the entire Year 12 class to have the skills necessary to communicate with the deaf children in rural Kajiado, where the Brookhouse student team would spend the two weeks of our annual service project retreat.

The culmination of their efforts was the Kajiado retreat. This is a service learning project that Brookhouse has run for the past five years, modelled on an RSIS experience. The Year 12 class spend two weeks living and working with the children of Ilbissil Primary School, an impoverished rural community school, 200 kms south of Nairobi.

We spent the two weeks interacting with the deaf children at the school, carried out a complete renovation of the hearing impaired unit, painted visual education murals on the walls and constructed new tables and benches for the classrooms. We also donated an interactive DVD as well as books to aid the teachers with their teaching,” says one of the students.

Brookhouse intend to continue the initiative and to continue to teach sign language. You can find out more about Brookhouse’s Round Square Anniversary Challenge here.

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