ARTICLE - HAITI SCHOOLS

IN RUINED HAITI SCHOOLS, SOME SEE OPPORTUNITY

By Jonathan M. Katz
Associated Press

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - After seven weeks with seven children huddled under a shelter of tarps and sheets on the median strip of a busy road, Lissithe Delomme says the Haitian government can't reopen schools fast enough.

"If they would open right now, I'd be pretty happy," she said, trying to ignore the tumult of two of her boys wrestling as she fried up plantains for sale. "They're just sitting around doing nothing."

The Jan. 12 earthquake dealt a devastating blow to Haiti's struggling schools: More than 80 percent in the quake zone were damaged or destroyed. All schools in Port-au-Prince and the other affected towns remain closed, and with tens of thousands of bored and restless children living in increasingly squalid encampments, patience is growing short.

Yesterday, a group of private-school directors delivered a petition to President Rene Preval decrying the lack of government action and demanding that schools reopen immediately - be they in tents, temporary buildings, or other makeshift facilities.

But some urge caution before rushing back into a system that never really worked in the first place.

"This is an opportunity in a lifetime to radically change the educational system in Haiti," said Marcelo Cabrol, head of the Inter-American Development Bank's education division.

The problems are monumental: Just one Haitian teacher in 10 is qualified, according to the development bank - and a third have not even completed ninth grade. The government cannot support more than a handful of schools, leaving the system dominated by fly-by-night, for-profit storefront schools with onerous fees.

Buildings were so unsafe that one school collapsed on its own in 2008, long before the quake, killing 100 students and adults.

Wealthy Haitians and foreigners opt out entirely, putting their children in upscale schools that cost $8,000 a year - more than most Haitians will spend on food and basic necessities in 20 years.

Before the quake, journalists visited classrooms in rickety warehouses, one with an open-pit toilet dug alongside the desks. In a private grade school blocks from the National Palace, a teacher slumped half asleep in a chair, while a teenage student scrawled rote Creole phrases on a flimsy blackboard.

That school is gone now - one of the more than 3,800 damaged or destroyed in the quake. Nearly 4,000 students, and more than 700 teachers, principals, and staff were killed during afternoon classes. All that's left of the Ministry of Education's main building is a crater filled with torn workbooks and lost teachers' ID cards.

Education advocates see a chance for a fresh start.

Celebrities such as Shakira, Nicole Kidman, and Keith Urban have pledged money to rebuild individual schools, and prominent U.S. educators are volunteering to help restructure the system.

Paul Vallas, a former Philadelphia and Chicago superintendent working to rebuild Louisiana's storm-ravaged Recovery School District, is working with the development bank, researching ways to build hurricane- and quake-resistant buildings in Haiti and create a unified curriculum to improve math, reading, and other skills.

"We benefited from the generosity of others, and we almost feel there's an obligation for us to do the same," Vallas said from New Orleans.

The bank has also reached out to Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp, proposing a program for Haiti that would train and employ teachers, drawing from some of the 35,000 university students who lost their classrooms, as well as Haitian diaspora and others overseas.

Education officials know they have limited time to act.

"A country can't function without education," said Pierre Michel Laguerre, the Education Ministry's director-general. "We can't have our children in the streets."