This is the 5th year that Give Hope 2 Kids has worked in our village -- teaching English, promoting reading, teaching computers, and more. Our motivation is to share our educational resources with the entire community. We want to help the kids in our area love learning so they'll have a chance to go onto high school and hopefully university after that.
At the start of this year Honduras made dramatic changes in its educational system and instituted several austerity measures that affect all its schools, including Urraco. The schools are now responsible to teach more subjects, have a longer school week, and all that with fewer teachers.
In Urraco we went from 3 teachers for 1st-6th grade, to 2 teachers for those grades. It's now acceptable for a teacher to have up to 40 students in their classroom, teaching multiple grades. All public schools now have mandatory Saturday school. And to top it off, the teachers are also supposed to teach English and computers to their 4th-6th grade students, without any new training or resources!
So, we asked our village teachers how we can help. They are excited for us to send teachers their way and we now have people from Give Hope 2 Kids teaching in the school full-time. Monica teaches English three days a week and Jose Rito teaches computers three days a week. Outside of school hours we're assisting the teachers with administrative tasks and providing them with teaching resources.
We've decided that in order to provide this strong presence and help at the local public school, that we'll need to suspend our Library Program for the time being. We plan to re-launch the Library in a few months, new and improved, with some new books and a finished computer lab.
We are grateful for the opportunity to invest in the lives of these young people through all our community outreach programs, from English classes to Youth Group. We feel we’ve had an opportunity to invest in long-term relationships with them and teach them skills that will help them have a better future. Thanks to all our education-loving supporters who help make this possible!