The Free High School for Adults

The Free High School for Adults, which opened in 2002, provides second chances for people who thought they might never get any. Its hundreds of students include women who were illiterate until an earlier partnership provided two large literacy programs in the San Juan area. Many graduates wanted to continue on to secondary education, which for the neglected (the rural poor, especially women) is essential at this historical moment. But the regular high schools in Nicaragua accept no one over 18 and no woman who has had a baby.

The Free High School operates in San Juan proper in a Saturday School (so that people who work all week-maids, night watchmen, fishermen-can attend), and it also comes directly to farm folks in 21 widely scattered rural communities.

With Nicaragua rivaling Haiti as the poorest country in the hemisphere, secondary education that teaches health and critical thinking and that develops social consciousness, as our program does, may produce the leaders of the future that this small country desperately needs.

We have grown tremendously in only four years of operation. In 2005 we enrolled 403 students--plus 260 in the Computer School and 40 in the English School. Our first year we had 12 graduates. In December 2005, over 40 will graduate. The Computer School also had its first graduation, of 28 students. Because of the rural influx in 2005 we had to add a second tenth-grade class and another teacher.

A majority in the high school (57%) are women. 78 of the 233 students in the in-town or "Saturday School" are rural, of whom 50 are women.

We are already achieving excellence. The Free High School was honored by being selected as one of only six international programs to be included in the Catalogue for Philanthropy 2004.

The quality of our teaching has received accolades from the national government; the discipline of our students is admired. The 2004 winner of the local and regional math Olympics at the eighth-grade level was a student of ours from a rural district, whose teacher, Rigoberto Flores, was one of our first 12 graduates! Our students alone are required before graduation to produce a monograph on social conditions in their home communities. In 2004 our top four students received grants to go on to higher education from the LACA Foundation

We focus on the complex educational, psychological, and material needs of working adults. Mothers can attend because we provide day-care. Two generations in a family often find themselves obtaining levels of education they never expected they could all get. The current record is four members of a family from the distant village of Tortuga.

Our students give back. We are also the only high school whose students provide adult literacy training to the population at large. In 2004, 55 of our students taught 80 illiterate people; in 2005, 100 volunteers teach 117. Four of our top graduates, now going to university on grants from the LACA Foundation, oversee the volunteers. Our program is so successful--a model of intimacy, flexibility, and comprehensiveness--that the regional Ministry of Education plans to ask other high schools for adults in southern Nicaragua to imitate it. This year the Newton San Juan Sister City Project gave the free High School the $1400 needed for the student-taught literacy program.

Our Nicaraguan partner, Dr. Rosa Elena Bello, also a nurse and an M.A. in Public Health, designed and now heads up the free High School-which she does in addition to running the town clinic, Community Medical Services; the town pharmacy; a volunteer health-outreach brigade; and the nutrition program, all since 1991. Dr. Bello has retained a group of innovative teachers dedicated to the highest standards of pedagogy since 1998, when the first literacy program began.

The Catalogue for Philanthropy points out that the Free High School is "highly cost-effective" and concludes, "The returns on these investments are, of course, beyond price-for both benefactors and beneficiaries."

$1000 pays for a year's worth of monthly training workshops for the 21 teachers

Give as generously as you can. Checks can be made out to Newton-SJ Sister City Project and sent to the treasurer of the Sister City Project, Ms. Fiora Houghteling, , 15 Bullough Park, Newton 02460. To donate online, please visit Network for Good.

For further information, contact the Director of Development, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, email: mgullette@msn.com. The North-American partner since 1998, she has raised money for the two literacy progrms and the Free High School. One of Margaret's essays on Nicaragua, "Florcita la Suerte" can be found in the Writers' Views section.

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A literacy class on the island of Ometepe.

The Original Literacy Programs

On August 21st of 2001, 246 newly literate women from in and around San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, were graduated from their three-year program in a celebration that lasted from morning until night. On the nearby island of Ometepe, by many counts even poorer than San Juan, 75 were graduated from another three-year program in 2003.

"Empowering Women Through Literacy" and all the subsequent Continuity Programs (the free High School for Adults, the Computer School, the English School, micro-lending) were organized by Dr. Rosa Elena Bello, the visionary director of Community Medical Services. CMS is a not-for-profit public health and medical facility located in San Juan. (It also operates the only pharmacy in town; and has been the center in southern Nicaragua of an international cervical cancer program.) Margaret Morganroth Gullette co-wrote and translated the proposals and has found the funding. The Agostino Foundation gave the venturesome grant for the first year in San Juan, and also for the last year in Ometepe. The International Foundation has been a long-term contributor. The Barr Foundation and Conservation, Food, and Health have been supportive.

The goal of the programs was to reach illiterate women--among the most disadvantaged in Nicaragua, with no previous access to adult education--and to teach them reading, writing, family planning, and health education in their barrios and villages, their supportive home places. The organizers hoped to strengthen their self-esteem and their position in the family and society, by helping them understand the world around them. That seemed ambitious enough. But the plan was successful beyond their wildest dreams. By the time the women finished, 215 of them had also earned a sixth-grade diploma awarded by the Ministry of Education. They had completed the entire primary school curriculum in three years, meeting only eight hours a week.

Thirty-three far-flung communities participated in San Juan's literacy programs, and another eleven met on Ometepe. "Literacy is not merely a/e/i/o/u," says Orlando Pineda, who ran the most famous literacy program in the world: the Sandinista's revolutionary push, right after they won the revolution, to expand the human wealth of a nation whose dictator had mired them in ignorance as well as poverty. "Literacy means having fewer women crying because their child dies." The journey of literacy begins with keywords that matter. Taught through material that is meaningful to their lives, people learn faster and retain better. In the photo on the right, the women are attending a first-year class held outdoors in the teacher's patio. One of the first words they learned was "feto," Spanish for foetus. Another was "futuro," the future.

The San Juan programs involved women from 15 to 60. Most literacy campaigns around the world select out the older women, thinking to improve their retention statistics. Our model program had an extraordinary retention rate, 82%. The Ometepe program's retention was lower--68%: most of the losses were due to growing economic hardship.

In Nicaragua, adult education needs to have a component of gender empowerment. This is one of the Latin-American countries with the highest population growth. The macho man actualizes himself by having a big family and a subordinate wife. Some male partners have emigrated as economic conditions have worsened in the 1990s, leaving many of the women students single heads-of-households--solteras. The High School program has admitted men, some of them the sons or brothers of the original students in the literacy programs.

Most of the 33 teachers in the literacy program were already health workers (brigadistas de salud) from Community Medical Services. Like the eleven teachers in Ometepe, they livied in their villages, making each classroom a women's center. All of them received minute salaries--$20 a month--but they welcomed the monthly trainings they received as teachers of literacy, gender, math, and eventually, all the primary-school subjects. Some of them had only a primary-school certificate themselves. Some of the teachers have gone on into the free High School for Adults.

The literacy programs have elevated the ability of these three hundred women to participate in civil society, and to be active on behalf of themselves and their families in matters of health, law, and economic development. All the programs, taken together, have raised the quality of village and town life in countless unreported ways.