Increasing scope and breadth of local education

Traditionally, “education” in rural Honduras has referred to very basic kindergarten through sixth grade in simple, one-room village schools.

ACTS’ partnership with local leaders and our generous donors has afforded us the opportunity to make education broader, more inclusive, relevant, and exciting for ALL AGES.

Educational Programs

Selected WINS circa 2024:

• Free regional high school academy

• Significant recruiting of indigenous teens to the high school academy

• Free English classes for regional teens and adults

• Free computer classes for regional teens and adults

• Free teen health education course for 72 teens in 2024

• Two local libraries with $8,000 in new books in 2024

• Free infant care training course for new mothers

• Free training in regenerative agriculture for regional farmers

• Free training and equipment to women starting home gardens

ACTS increases scope and breadth of local education to improve quality of life and employment opportunities. In a recent survey we learned, on average, farmers in the area have had just three years of schooling. Today, a job in the formal economy of Honduras requires a high school diploma. ACTS is committed to providing quality education with access and a pathway to a high school diploma.

Elementary schools are joint ventures where if a community can construct a school building and fill it with children, the government will provide a teacher and their salary. The rest is up to each community and where most communities have nothing to spare, they cannot enrich the educational environment. Moreover, most residents have never seen anything different. Many children drop out before 6th grade.

ACTS’ enriches elementary education by providing in-school pediatric dental screening and treatment, hosting a library that is a popular destination for school field trips, repairs to school buildings, and a traveling library with picture books, early readers, and elementary-appropriate reference materials.

Several years ago, when two hurricanes struck in a two-week period, ten schools were badly damaged, and ACTS provided $10,000 in grants to cover materials for repairs to roofs and other necessities.

ACTS’ significant Role in Secondary Education began in late 2023 when we assumed responsibility for the only high school academy “colegio” in the region. See Story of the Colegio (LINK). This is a major, unbudgeted financial challenge for ACTS. Though the government provides the teachers’ salaries, everything else is funded by ACTS including transportation, two meals per day, uniforms and shoes, backpacks, textbooks and school supplies for each student. Also, ACTS funds maintenance of the physical plant, salaries for the cooks, librarian, and special teachers for ESL and computers, building a new set of bathrooms, replacing classroom furniture, special programs, and more.

Our first step was to make the colegio a regional school with more access to more children, especially the most forgotten indigenous teens. Coming off a 3- year pandemic shutdown, the colegio had a mothballed physical plant and the space to accommodate up to 100 students. Our first job was to “think like a kid” and make school exciting. In collaboration with the El Rosario Education Committee, we were more than doubled the enrollment by extraordinary outreach to remote villages.

The regional colegio includes students from distant mountain villages. Fund raising for student transportation is a top priority for ACTS. Our largest expense is transporting the students to and from school. Rural Honduras has terrible roads, some communities are truly “out there,” and families simply do not own vehicles. ACTS’ customized transportation scheme includes a mix of paying the fare for seats on a private bus service, students walking down a mountain, hired drivers on motorcycles, a pickup truck, and riding horses. In 2024, the cost is $14,000 and we expect this to go up to $20,000 in 2025 when the enrollment is scheduled to increase.

We make school fun. We take the opportunity to make school and learning exciting every time we enrich the curriculum and school experience. In 2024, we have added 700 new books to the libraries, provided teachers with supplies for displays and learning materials, promoted soccer teams for boys and girls with bright colegio t- shirts and competed at regional tournament, completed a 4-month teen health learning program (‘Taking Care of You’), and engaged community members in school pride.

High school is the pathway to the formal economy. Unemployment and low wages are rampant in Honduras. To compete in the job market, candidates must demonstrate they have a high school diploma, even for a simple factory job.

Be a HERO to our teens and underwrite the colegio transportation costs! You can donate here.

As of today, there is an unmet need to fund post-secondary education and training. Choices range from a few months at the police academy to nursing or medical school, or university. Graduating students want to work in professions that require training and involve fees ranging from the Police Academy ($600 one-time fee) to nursing (fees dependent on the program) to university ($4000 per year for 4-5 years).

For lack of funding, we are declining students’ requests. ACTS is determined to establish a post-secondary training fund in 2025 and would appreciate donors from our broad community. To sponsor a student, or the Post-Secondary Fund, donate here.

We believe in lifelong learning. Years ago, the general belief was learning was for school and school was for little kids. Today, people of all ages are interested in learning to fill gaps in their knowledge.

Being bilingual opens doors to opportunities. The ability to speak English is a notable plus for job seekers. Learners of all ages are welcome to the FREE English as A Second Language lessons offered at the regional Community Education Center in El Rosario.

Computer training is a valuable skill in the job market. Everyone is welcome to join a computer course at the regional Community Education Center in El Rosario where the curriculum focuses on the Microsoft Office suite of applications. These courses are free and open to all ages.

Changes in agricultural practices are essential. With the Honduran NGOs COSECHA and FIHA, we introduced regenerative agriculture including use of cover crops, livestock management, seed harvesting, and organic techniques. Passing information from father to son has been the trusted and traditional way to train the next generation of farmers. To accelerate learning about regenerative agriculture, ACTS prioritizes making training open to all ages.

Women are learning to grow vegetables in kitchen gardens. Big-field farming is the purview of males. Five years ago, women established the Hope & Faith Garden Group, advised by Dean Seibert, and began learning from ACTS how to diversify their families’ diets by experimenting with drip irrigation, seed saving, and other systems to grow vegetables in their new kitchen gardens for self-satisfaction and health.

Taking Care of Moms is an educational series for pregnant women, their own mothers, and newborns. The custom curriculum was developed by an ACTS- organized committee of women including El Rosario’s Nurse Nolvia and a host of U.S.- based medical personnel and educators. Topics such as sleep, crying, supplemental feeding, or nutrition during pregnancy and post-partum are popular and everyone appreciates testing healthy recipes over lunch. Moms receive baby gear such as thermometers and pacifiers and the “ask anything” format for discussions is popular. Taking Care of Moms is funded by the Dr. Margot Krasnoff Fund.

Taking Care of You is a teen health education series. Drs. Cesar Alas and Karla Molineros, early career Honduran MDs designed a lively curriculum and met the challenge of keeping 78 teens engaged in serious topics during eight 3-hour sessions ranging from acne to sexual decision making and tattoos. Students received certificates of participation that will be added to their academic CVs. We expect to publish the results on learning outcomes in 2025 and look forward to sharing the curriculum with 16 other SAT colegios in Honduras when version 2.0 is completed. Taking Care of You is funded by the Dr. Margot Krasnoff Fund.

Teen leadership training in La Fuerza para el Futuro (Force for the Future) provided an annual week of training for teens until the pandemic. The goals were to teach basic leadership skills, to create a web of social connections among teens in many communities, and to spread the ethic of volunteerism. Dartmouth College undergraduates were counselors during the week and the bidirectional learning encouraged the Dartmouth students to rethink their assumptions about life in a rural low-resource community, while the Honduran teens demonstrated to the community, and themselves, the power of engaged teens.

Teen leadership training inOver 10 years, hundreds of Fuerza teens learned subject matter content and using a variety of techniques including public speaking, writing and performing skits, and developing graphic materials, taught what they learned to adults in the community.

Fuerza had several deliverables:

• To keep children safe from agricultural chemicals, they built and distributed 90 “no-touch” safety boxes for farming families to use for safe in-home storage of toxic chemicals.

• A multi-year project to prevent cervical cancer focused on teens learning about condom usage to prevent HPV. With advocacy from the Fuerza, the local clinic provides free condoms on a shelf outside the clinic.

• Circa 2024, the former weeklong Fuerza training is folded into the Colegio experience in formats such as the Taking Care of You program.

Educational Facilities

The regional Community Education Center known as El Centro, is the crossroads for extracurricular learning. It was conceived in 2015 when a posse of Dartmouth undergraduates and Honduran teens in our leadership program La Fuerza el Futuro (the force for the future) rehabilitated an abandoned school building. With what seemed like grand ideas of a center with a library, classes, and more, El Centro was launched with great fanfare. Since then, ACTS funding and consultation has helped the community to grow El Centro into a lively and useful community resource. Our funding covers salaries for library and educational staff, program expenses, and computer equipment. Importantly, residents from many communities use El Centro’s resources for free.

El Centro’s public library, known as the Doctor Dean Bibliotheca, is maximized weekday mornings with elementary classes using books and online resources. After school, it is the hub for students doing homework with reference materials and internet searches. The Traveling Library is a customized resource to support individual teachers in remote K-6 schools.

El Centro’s classrooms are home to free courses in English as a Second Language and computer courses about using Microsoft Office. Mid-day, classes are filled with residents of other communities and range in ages. After school, the colegio students leave their school campus and walk to El Centro to continue their learning in English and computers on alternate days. English and computer skills are helpful when competing for scarce jobs in the formal economy.

El Centro provides the only large space for events and celebrations. A community kitchen with gas stove and refrigerator is an important resource for event hosts.

The Colegio campus is a collection of buildings organized around a pleasant grassy area bookended by simple log soccer goals. Six classrooms, a library/media center, kitchen, and restrooms plus agricultural learning space and a kitchen comprise the campus.

The Agriculture Center, funded solely by ACTS, provides educational resources about safe handling of agricultural chemicals and a facility for safe storage. Located centrally, the facility is used by farmers who own land and the many who work for them as day laborers. As a result of ACTS’ educational interventions, now farmers store their chemicals safely at the Center and pick them up in the morning on the way to the fields. When they return them, the farmers use the Center’s showers and large sinks to clean chemicals off themselves and their equipment. Before heading home to their families, they change into clean clothes to prevent cross-contamination.