EDUCATION

ACTS has been involved in education for many years, but the program took a major leap a decade ago with the renovation and opening of the Education Center and Library in El Rosario.

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Investing in the future
ACTS has supported the development of new facilities, resources and technology in coordination with local staff and leadership, in order to better the educational needs of local students.

ACTS has been involved in education for many years, but the program took a major leap a decade ago with the renovation and opening of the Education Center and Library in El Rosario. ACTS has continued to develop and expand its educational initiatives in the subsequent years, and its work is currently focused on the following initiatives:

  1. The expansion of the resources and uses of the library.

  2. The expansion and use of technology and computers.

  3. The provision and improvement of English as a Second Language instruction.

  4. The continuation of youth leadership programs.

  5. The collaboration with local teachers in professional development and the improvement of classroom instruction.

These initiatives and others that ACTS has pursued in recent years are described below.

Education Center and Library

The Education Center and Library in El Rosario opened in 2008. For this project, ACTS collaborated with The Children’s Initiative and La Fuerza para el Futuro, a community leadership program, to renovate a derelict building into a community education center. The Education Center houses a library – the Doctor Dean Biblioteca – with a full time librarian who is currently Yorlin Castro. Under his direction, the library has developed into a busy center of activities that offers its resources through both in-house use and local lending. It even offers a small lending library that rotates among the village schools surrounding El Rosario, and it loans out solar lights for those who can’t read at home due to a lack of electricity. With the guidance of Rubi Simon from the Howe Library in Hanover, Yorlin has been involved lately in expanding and organizing the library’s books and assets.

ACTS added computer capabilities to the library in a series of steps that featured an expansion of the center in 2016. Village interest in computers has been enthusiastic, and computers and numerous classes in their use have been added in recent years.

A community kitchen was added in a separate building outside the Education Center in 2014. Now the Center is used frequently for community gatherings of all types, and for a wide variety of educational activities, including classes in sewing, carpentry, nutrition, teacher training, and English as a Second Language.  

School renovations

ACTS, with the help of young Americans and Hondurans in the La Fuerza para el Futuro program, has renovated schools in several of the villages surrounding El Rosario.  Renovations have included repairs and painting of interior and exterior walls, the replacement of doors and windows, building of latrines, and general site upgrading.

Technology Program

As an extension of the work ACTS has done with the Education Center and Library, some additional needs of the community were identified, mainly focused on the area of technology. An assessment of the technology offerings at the library was conducted several years ago that suggested that the community was very supportive of improved technology services, especially computers at the education center.

With this in mind, ACTS volunteers lead by Ethan LaRochelle, have worked with the El Rosario Education Committee and librarian, Yorlin Castro, to develop resources to support educational needs of the community. Through the donation of new laptops, Yorlin has developed a multi-level computer education curriculum focusing on word processing and spreadsheets.

Additionally, because there was no internet access at the time, ACTS installed a stand-alone wireless network at the Education Center that is loaded with archived copies of educational content including Spanish-language Wikipedia, Khan Academy tutorials, Hesperian health guides, and much more. This information is available from any WiFi-enabled device, so even when the library is closed community members with phones can access the information. The internet has finally arrived in El Rosario in 2019, and ACTS looks forward to planning extensive new opportunities with technology on the village.

Teacher Training

For many years, ACTS has sponsored professional development programs for the area teachers that have sought to develop skills and to promote activities that are useful in their classrooms. Local teachers have met with ACTS members in instructional and collaborative settings that are especially valuable because of the relative isolation of most of the area teachers. The most recent local initiative led by Betsy Rybeck has been the creation of math resource kits that can enhance math instruction in the local schools.