Jisu Niketan

Jisu Niketan is rated 3 out of 5 in the category primary/secondary education. Read and write reviews about Jisu Niketan. Jisu Niketan School started as a temporary health home with about 50 children and their widowed mothers living around the old Siliguri railway station in 1974 at Jesu Ashram. Two teachers were hired to give them basic lessons in English and singing and dancing. As time went on children from the nearby riverside began to come and joined the informal classes. In 1993, Fr. Cherian Padiyara the then Provincial of Darjeeling, separated the school from Jesu Ashram and officially declared the school as Jisu Niketan School. In the course of the time the number of students increased. Soon a one story school was constructed on the Matigara property of the Jesuits. The temporary school was made of bamboo, wood and cement. Soon proposals were drafted and sent to Missio Aachen and Kindermissionswerk, Aachen for financial assistance to construct a decent school building. Euro 40,0000 was received and with some additional contribution from the Province a simple concrete school was built. The one story school building has nine classrooms, one staff room, an office for the Headmaster, a kitchen to prepare mid day meal for the children and separate toilets for boys and girls. There are some 200 students, studying at Jisu Niketan School in grades Kindergarten to grade 4. Most of the children are the children of the stone breakers who live in the nearby riverside with their parents who are stone breakers. And the others are the children of daily wage laborers, small vendors from the vicinity, and the children of people suffering from Hansen’s disease and tuberculosis who are under the care of Jesu Ashram. There is considerable pressure on the school authorities from the parents to admit more students but the norm “poorest of the poor” is strictly followed in the selection and admission.