By Jennifer McCallum | Assistant to the Director
We are wrapping up our second unit at The School of Hope! Students have finished all of their projects and work, sat for their exams and now are awaiting their grades from their teachers!
The most exciting part about this end of the unit? That a majority of this work was done IN-PERSON by our students as they returned to school. At the end of May we received permission from the Ministry of Education to reopen in a covid-safe way. Meaning a hybrid model, small rotating groups, students in "pods" so if there is a case they can quarantine easily and lots of out door learning, all with masks and improved health measures!
This permission did not come easily and Nancy, our Technical Director in the Education Team, worked on this paperwork and process for almost a year. This permission does not mean we will remain open permanently, we will have to adapt our model between fully virtual, or phase 1 or 2 of hybrid depending on the number of cases in our local community. Our first priority is always keeping everyone safe! But it means that we have a bit more certainty moving forwards and that we will see our students much more! We will begin to see the educational, emotional and health impact of Covid on our students. We are ready to adapt our services to make sure they can continue to study and catch up the time they have lost to reach their goals.
Students returning to in-person learning does not mean all of our hard work behind the scenes is done, in fact we have also recently embarked on another project ...during the process of applying for permission to reopen Nancy´s persistence & resilience impressed MINEDUC (Ministry of Education) and MSPAS (Ministry of Health). So much so that we have been nominated to apply for Excellence Accreditation. This is a lengthy process and few schools in Guatemala have yet been nominated or selected for this, we are excited to be in this process!
There are so many developments to be excited about here at EFTC and The School of Hope however, by far the most rewarding development has been having our students return. This time of learning at a distance has been hard for all, for teachers and students alike. We will not yet know the full impact it has had. Even our older students who have been fully connected in live virtual classes through tablets and internet funded by EFCT have missed out on seeing their friends and many other developmental activities.
By far those we were the most excited to see return to the school were our youngest students in Kindergarten. They enrolled with us during a pandemic and have never been able to come to a class here. Seeing their eyes wide with wonder as they saw the spaces they could learn in and met their teachers made it all worth it.
We could not have gotten here without you. This has never been more true than now as we are fighting to stay connected to our students, to help them catch up and to make sure that their education and their futures are not another casualty of covid-19. We cannot wait to share our students' exam results with you all! We will include this in our next update but if you would like to be kept even more in the loop follow the links in this report to see our social media where we share daily updates and photos of students studying hard!
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