The School

With an enrollment of 130 in 2011 the school continues to provide the best level education available in the region. Students are taught in English (wherever possible) and undertake a range of subjects including Nepali and Hindi to maintain this important aspect of their culture. Other subjects include Maths, Science and Environmental Studies, Art and Crafts, History, General Knowledge and Social studies. Subjects are selected and reviewed annually by the schools managing committee, consisting of the principal and the teachers of the school together with the parents and guardians of the children. Maintaining this high level of community involvement further attributes to the schools continued success and popularity in the region. The children also undertake extra-curricular activities on Saturday mornings and visitors are encouraged to share any skill, activity or hobby they have with the children during this time.

The ambition of creating an appropriate learning and development environment for the children has resulted in the completion of a 12 room school building in July 2011. The ongoing support from visitors has further allowed us to have a stocked library with shelves, a range of sporting equiptment, desks in each classroom and the ongoing improvement off our education.

Current funding and looking forward

Future development's will include a kitchen and a small visitors quarters as to allow more visitors and other activity based groups to be involved in our development. The kitchen therefore will provide lunch to the children, other meals to the borders of the school and food to the visitors. The planning of this further development begun in October 2011 and we are eager to watch it progress in months to come.

At present, a small fee ranging from Rs100-300 per month (approx AUS$2.80–8.50) based on year of education is charged in an effort to cover some of the running costs of the school. Despite this fee being insufficient to properly fund the school, only a very small portion of the parents/guardians of the 80 families have regular incomes and a higher fee is therefore not viable. At present, teachers’ salaries at Sunrise Academy are approximately 1/10 of the salaried paid to teachers at government schools. Once the visitors quarters is built we will be looking into utilising this space out of school terms for hiking, research and other groups of people interested in the region. This will ideally assist us in purchasing the essential educational and health resources for the children of our school.

The principal of Sunrise Academy has assigned ownership of a piece of land acquired in early 2008 to the Managing Committee and has committed to an installment payment system for the land. In doing so, the school’s ownership and continuation is not subject to an individual and their death but instead the operation can prosper long into the future.