How Sandra Lavie Gojkovic’s Free School on Sagar Island Builds Trust and Access to Education

On Sagar Island in West Bengal, a free school founded through The India School Project has tried to tackle a problem that cannot be solved simply by opening a classroom: persuading families facing difficult circumstances that their children can attend regularly. Swiss educator Sandra Lavie Gojkovic describes going door to door with local colleagues, speaking to parents who were uncertain about sending their children to school. A July 2026 People of India reel tells that story through images and on-screen text.

From a personal decision to a local school

Gojkovic says she left a corporate career and moved to India around 15 years ago. Her organisation’s website gives a more specific date for the project: it says her savings and support from local partner organisations made it possible to establish The India School Project in 2012. The project works on a remote island and describes education and opportunities for children and women as its main aims.

The school’s approach was not limited to admitting pupils. In interviews published in 2026, Gojkovic described visiting homes to hear families’ concerns and encouraging parents to send children to school. Some families relied on work done by children, including accompanying adults in shrimp-related livelihoods, making school attendance a practical as well as a social decision. She said teachers continued home visits when attendance remained irregular. These are her accounts of how trust was gradually built, not independently measured evidence of a rise in enrolment caused by any single action.

What the project says it provides

The India School Project’s website reports a primary school educating 150 children in five classes. It also reports tuition and daily meals for 120 pupils attending public schools and sewing training for 20 women. These figures are the project’s own published descriptions and should not be mistaken for independently audited outcomes. They nevertheless show that the stated programme goes beyond one classroom: it combines teaching, food and support for families.

The People of India reel, published on 8 July 2026, also presents the school as a place where children are encouraged to speak against child marriage, trafficking and domestic violence. That is a description of its educational aims. The reel does not itself establish how often such interventions occur or their measurable effect on these harms.

Why parental trust matters alongside free schooling

A child may have a nearby school but still face obstacles to attending it: the cost of travel or supplies, the need to help at home, irregular income, worries about safety and uncertainty about what education will bring. Gojkovic’s description of patient visits to parents illustrates how schools and communities can work on these barriers together. It also means families should not be casually blamed for initial hesitation without considering their circumstances.

India’s Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, in force since 2010, guarantees free and compulsory elementary education to children aged 6–14. The responsibility to ensure that education lies with public authorities. A community-supported school may offer valuable additional access and care, but its work is not a substitute for the government’s legal duty to provide schooling to every eligible child.

What this experience establishes—and what remains to be measured

The strongest supported conclusion is that Gojkovic and local partners have sustained a rural education initiative that reports serving children through schooling, meals and other support, and that outreach to parents is central to its story. The organisation’s current programme descriptions and multiple published interviews support that account. Independent information on year-by-year attendance, learning gains, long-term progression and child-protection outcomes would be needed to measure its effects more precisely.

The point is not that one foreign founder transformed a village single-handedly. The project itself credits local partners, and the work described depends on teachers, parents and pupils. Its wider significance is practical: access to education becomes more meaningful when schools earn families’ trust and respond to the pressures children live with—while the public right to education remains a responsibility of the state.