Government Aid, Alumni Donations Help Overcrowded School in India Improve

Chennai, India

The Chromepet Government School for Boys stands on one of Chennai's noisy side streets, behind a yellow concrete compound wall lined with election posters. On the inside, blackboards hang from the compound wall, and students sit on the earth under trees to learn when there is not enough room inside the school's three two-story buildings to accommodate them.

Beside the open-air classrooms are half-open ones: rooms with walls only four feet high and a terracotta-tiled roof, for high school students. Seating is slightly better here: chipped and cracked wooden benches and desks.

Even inside the buildings, seating is cramped, with as many as 60 to 100...