Construction Report 2020
Lakshmi Devi Academy's long boundary wall with seating, wire netting at the top, and freshly whitewashed. Every year, we tackle a variety projects based on how much we raised for construction in the previous year. These projects fall into several categories that may overlap, such as major maintenance, long term renovation, or government requirements. Due to Covid-19 and a prolonged monsoon season, the work took longer than anticipated. Our kids haven’t been at LDA full time since the end of March, so delays did not impact their safety or education. Thanks to the generous support of donors in 2019, we accomplished the next stage of our long term renovation plan – demolition of an unusable portion of the building and new underground water and septic systems. This renovation plan became necessary several years ago when the government informed us that not only did we not have enough restroom stalls for 300 students, but that having the restrooms in a separate building was a safety risk. They’re not wrong about either of these issues. LDA was built in 1988 for about 150 students. There were no restrooms in a commercial building in the area (there were not, in fact, any other buildings that were solely commercial). LDA was a new concept in Dehradun at the time – a private, secular, charitable school for children of any gender. At the time, it was perfectly acceptable for boys to just ‘go’ wherever they wanted but girls couldn’t (and still can’t). Since we couldn’t solve this challenge on a large scale we focused on what we could solve by giving our kids and staff onsite restrooms separate from the main building since at that time, attached restrooms [...]