The program began in 1986 with the establishment of a one school in a small off-road village several kilometers from the campus. The success of this experiment — which to some extent revitalized the whole village — persuaded the Education Secretary of the Central Government to support one or more new Satellite schools each year during the term of the grant. Twelve schools have been constructed to date, the maximum number we can sustain and administer, given our current resources.

Each village provides land for its Satellite School, and the community gives whatever help it can in constructing a rustic building on the site, with one classroom and a storage space for teaching materials. The grounds are landscaped for water conservation and surrounded with trees to create a hospitable atmosphere for learning. Classes are "vertically grouped", with children of various ages and abilities sitting together to study one or several subjects individually or in co-operative learning groups. Children learn from study cards that the teacher has made by hand as part of his or her training course; and the teacher guides them through the material.

Each Satellite School serves as a resource centre for its village, often providing adult education classes at night. Literacy can spread throughout the village as adults and working children use the same facilities and materials for their own basic education. Community participation extends to landscaping the school grounds and cultivating trees and plants that provide fuel, fodder, fruit and medicinal herbs for common use. This mixture of conservation and education taps into deep traditional associations between learning and forests, which benefit the whole village. To revive these ancient associations, each of our rural schools carries a Sanskrit name with the suffix "vanam", meaning "grove".

Each school has around forty students at various levels in terms of achievement and ability. The school buildings are simple rooms with a small storeroom. There is also a round mud hut with a thatched roof built in the local style, surrounded by a pleasant garden with low-cost play equipment.

In these single-teacher schools, each student learns at his or her own pace. The interface between the examination requirements and the educational programs in the Satellite-schools has been carefully worked out. Students take the common examination given by the Andhra Pradesh State Education Board at the end of Class 5, with excellent results – several students having received ranks in the district.

By rotation several Satellite-schools function as a resource centre for a cluster of other single-teacher schools. Each of these mini-centers has facilities for periodic hands-on refresher training for teachers, and houses equipment for producing new materials. Continual exchanges eventually lead to a renewal, updating and refining of the teaching-learning materials and methods, and prevent formation of heavy hierarchical structures.

The core of this network is the “School in a box” - a multi grade multi level methodology with an integrated curriculum that is relevant to the needs of rural people.

Classroom management in these Satellite Schools is an essential part of the RIVER approach and is considered to have both administrative and pedagogic significance. Unlike many multigrade classrooms, where children sit according to grade, gender or learning ability, the RIVER programme helps children to work in groups that are divided according to the level of the teacher’s role and the child’s autonomy in a particular cognitive task. Students work either alone or in groups, with older students helping the younger ones. There are also whole class and small group interactions for several of the activities connected with language expression through oral and written exercises. The composition of the groups is dynamic, with the children moving in and out of groups, depending on their activity. This system is based on the strong belief that real and meaningful learning takes place through the dynamic interaction between teacher and children and among children themselves.

The mechanics and contents of the RIVER multilevel program involve a specific kind of dynamics, which is unique to the multigrade multilevel situation. Here the teacher’s role shifts from being a purveyor of knowledge to a facilitator of learning for a group of children who at any given time are at different levels in their learning and thus are often involved in diverse tasks and activities. On a day-to-day basis the teacher would need to be involved in a variety of activities: initiate children into their learning tasks, create groups for peer-supported and participatory learning, evaluate students who have completed a certain stage in their learning, and help the slower ones to understand and complete their tasks. The teacher would need to ensure that every child is profitably engaged, even as he or gets involved with the learning process of specific children.

On a wider scale, the teacher also gets rooted in the community, willing and able to draw upon local resources, and create local-specific materials to supplement the common educational materials. The teacher organizes the classroom to ensure appropriate storage of materials and display of teaching aids and data from field trips. He or she also makes a timetable and a weekly plan and orients the students initially using learning materials and taking care of the classroom and its surroundings.

The teacher plans time for group activities such as singing songs, craft-work, present puppet shows, conduct mime and mimicry activities, and undertake the village survey and the metric mela. In a well-managed multilevel classroom, disciplined learning for all arises from the very sense of joyful engagement and enthusiastic participation.

The teacher maintains a record of each child’s progress on the learning ladder, which is updated every week. The teacher also maintains a record of how the class as a whole is distributed along the learning ladder. Based on this the common average time required for children in a well-managed classroom to complete a milestone can be empirically established. This enables the identification of children who are not progressing, as they should. It also enables school supervisors to identify schools that are not progressing satisfactorily.

Application of this method has shown that teachers with little or no prior training or experience in teaching can quickly start teaching and managing a class effectively. Each set of teaching-learning material contains a user-friendly teacher’s manual, which includes detailed explanation of the usage of teaching-learning material and frequently encountered problems.

The Satellite schools are conceived and run on the principle of community involvement in the process of education. Parents of children become active partners in the schooling of their children in a variety of ways like participating in group learning activities that draw upon the resources of the community, and if needed some can even substitute for an absent teacher. The parents are conversant with the ladder, and are able to track the child’s progress even if they are illiterate. This has proved a useful tool for ensuring close relations between the school and the community, as well as parental support for the child’s learning. If needed, the ladder can be transformed into a pictorial report card for each child.

Because of this varied involvement, our program has been able to produce a sense of ownership and pride in the village community and to nurture a sense of ease with their school. At the same time, academic subjects are covered rigorously so that students perform well in State examinations and are fully prepared to enter Government schools at the middle level.

The school itself is not limited to its boundary walls, but sees the whole community including neighboring villages and local landscape as its learning environment. Each satellite school has the potential to serve as a resource centre for the surrounding villages as well as a catalyst for constructive change. In fact each of the twelve schools has adopted one government school and is exposing the formal teachers to various alternatives available to tackle pedagogical problems faced in the classrooms.

Drawing upon the rich knowledge of folk and oral traditions of the community a number of stories have been harvested and produced in the form of booklets with illustrations by children and photograph of the author. The children have shown a great interest in reading these stories “written” by people whom they know and can relate to. This kind of input also helps in rooting the child further in his tradition rather than alienating him from it. A clear impact of this input has been the increased interest among mothers in learning to read with the help of their children, giving a definite boost to adult literacy programs that might otherwise have failed.