S. M. Cyril

Sister M. Cyril Mooney, IBVM (21 July 1936 – 24 June 2023) was an India-based Irish nun, educationist, educational innovator and 2007 winner of the Padma Shri Award, the Government of India's fourth-highest civilian honour. She received awards including recognition by UNESCO (1994) and the International Christian Stewardship Award in 2002 given by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

A native of Ireland, she grew up in Wolfe Tone Square, Bray, where she became a messenger for her mother handing out magazines for the Holy Ghost Fathers' Missions. She won a scholarship to Loreto Convent in Bray, and took orders in 1955 into the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She had lived and worked in India since 1956, where she emerged as a nationwide leader in bringing quality education to urban and rural poor children. Under her Rainbow School Programme, "We mandated ourselves that we would take 25% of poor children every time we did admissions, and over time this moved up to 50%, Mooney said in an interview with The Irish Times in 2015. "To help street children keep up their attendance, accommodation was provided on site in a model that has been copied by the West Bengal government."

Background
Professed a Sister of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1955), she arrived in India on 10 October 1956. She earned a PhD in Zoology (Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India). From 1979, she was Principal of the Loreto Day School Sealdah.

Death
S. M. Cyril died in Kolkata on 24 June 2023 at the age of 86.

Civic honours/awards

 * 2015: Saint Michael's College Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters
 * 2013: Irish Presidential Distinguished Service Award
 * 2012: Aparajita award from Rupashi Bangla (Public Choice)
 * 2011: Monmouth University's Global Visionary Award
 * 2007: Padma Shri Award, the fourth highest civilian honour granted by the Indian government
 * 2002: International Christian Stewardship Award, Bishops of America.
 * 2000: The Kolkata Telegraph Award for Creative Excellence
 * 1994: The NOMA Award for Spreading Literacy, UNESCO
 * The Kolkata Telegraph Award for Social Service (7 times)
 * Friend of Child In Need Institute (CINI) Award

<!--

Projects and major accomplishments
Loreto Day School - Sealdah
 * During her tenure as principal, Sister Cyril transformed this once exclusively upper-class private school for girls into a model for equality-based educational change in India.
 * At present, 721 of the 1500 girls in attendance come from poor families (from slums and villages all over West Bengal) unable to pay school fees. The remaining 779 girls pay their full fees to attend.
 * All Loreto students in Class V or higher also act as teachers in the Rainbow Program and Rural Child-to-Child Education Program.

The Rainbow Program

 * Sister Mooney's school houses, feeds, and educates nearly 250 formerly street-dwelling children, in addition to welcoming another 100 for special classes during the school day. These residents, called "Rainbows", are, despite arriving with little or no school experience or literacy, integrated into mainstream classrooms as soon as possible. This is often in the children's mother tongues (Bengali or Hindi), but a substantial proportion of the Rainbow students are able to integrate into the English medium Loreto Day School itself.
 * This model has successfully been implemented at dozens of other schools across India, including all of the Loreto Schools in Kolkata.

Barefoot Teachers Training Program
 * This program provides teacher training to young men and women from slums and villages near Kolkata who lack the basic requirements to be admitted to teachers' colleges. Sister Cyril and her staff have trained over 7,000 teachers in this program, who in turn have brought primary education to over 350,000 village children with no access to education. The name "Barefoot Teachers" comes from the philosophy that one doesn’t need shoes to walk, but only feet. The teachers in this program are given practical teaching skills (the feet) without the unnecessary (and irrelevant, in this case) addition of teaching theory (the shoe).

Shikshalaya Prakalpa
 * This program, which may be understood as an expanded urban arm of the Barefoot Teachers Training Program, coordinates 470 teaching centres throughout Kolkata. The teachers at these centres (some 1,400 at present) receive similar Barefoot Teaching training at the Loreto School in Sealdah before returning to the slums to teach children there who had no previous access to education. Thus far, over 26,000 children have benefited from this program. Shikshalaya Prakalpa also owns and operates a Mobile Library that transports educational reading materials to the slum teaching centres.

Hidden Domestic Child Labour Outreach
 * This program, another arm of the Loreto Day School, combats the crisis of young children being put to work for their families or other slum employers rather than being sent to school. Loreto students, under the guidance of Sister Cyril, actively seek out children and employers in these situations, and through various methods (i.e. talking with the children, badgering the employers, asking the children to "play" and then bringing them to school) take steps to reduce this trend.
 * Loreto students have presented a traditional Indian dance drama which deals thematically with the issue of domestic child labour to over 50,000 other schoolchildren in Kolkata.

Rural Child-to-Child Education
 * Every Thursday, Loreto students in Class V and above travel to villages outside of Kolkata to teach schoolchildren there whose class sizes are usually 120 pupils to one teacher or higher. The program provides more intimate learning experiences for the rural students while simultaneously bringing the current struggles of rural education to the minds of the regular Loreto students. These efforts reach over 3,500 students per week.

Brick Field School Project The Project started in 2008 with the vision to bring the school to the children. The project's main objective was an education for the migrant children in the Brick kilns of West Bengal with an open-air trunk school. The migrant children travel with their families for 6 to 7 months to work in the brick fields and thus when they return to their village in Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh they eventually fail to cope with their studies and drop out of school. The Brick field school help the children continue with their basic education. -->