ARTICLE - SCHOOLS IN HAITI

HAITI'S STRUGGLE TO GET CHILDREN BACK TO SCHOOL
(New America Foundation) - By Kristie van de Wetering

Today we feature a guest post by Eric Tyler, a research assistant with the international programs unit at Plan USA, a non-profit organization that has been operating in Haiti since 1973. Early Ed Watch asked Eric to provide an update on how the January earthquake has affected Haitian children and their schooling.

The earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010 crippled an already inadequate education system. Nearly half a million children were directly affected and still live in settlements where drinking water is limited, hygiene and sanitation levels are low, and few basic social services exist. An essential step in bringing back a sense of normalcy for these children is to get to them back to school.

The earthquake was the strongest to hit Haiti in more than 200 years, and its impact on the education sector was unprecedented. In the earthquake’s aftermath, Haiti’s Education Minister Joel Jean-Pierre declared “the total collapse of the Haitian education system” in which half of Haiti’s primary and secondary schools were damaged or destroyed. Not only were physical resources decimated but human resources as well, and in the West province alone, the Ministry of Education reported that more than 38,000 students and 1,300 educators perished.

The full destruction of Haiti’s education system wasn’t the result of one afternoon but rather the outcome of decades of negligence. The Chilean earthquake that occurred a month and half after the earthquake in Haiti recorded a magnitude of 8.8 on the Richter scale — 500 times stronger than the quake in Haiti; however, comparatively, the result of the earthquake was far less due to Chile’s developed infrastructure and disaster preparedness.

Prior to the earthquake, Haiti’s education system was in a fragile state with relatively little government investment and oversight, in which an estimated 90 percent of the schools were privately run. In 2007, more than 9,000 preschool classrooms were privately managed compared to 433 run by the government. To put this into context, according to the CIA World Fact Book, Haiti ranks in the bottom 10 countries for public expenditure on education as percentage of GDP. Despite this, there is recognition among Haitians that education is a powerful tool to escape poverty, and poor households will spend 15 to 25 percent of their income on private school fees with additional expenditures for books and uniforms.

According to Haiti's Ministry of Education, 54 percent of the population was enrolled in some sort of preschool before the earthquake, 76 percent were getting basic, or elementary, education services, and 22 percent were enrolled in the upper and lower secondary grades (similar to the American high school system). Because few daycare programs existed, preschools were often overloaded having to take on infants as young as one. This overcrowding and lack of regulation and formalization were the core challenges facing Haiti’s preschools prior to the earthquake. And these problems were not limited to preschool classrooms. According to the Haitian Foundation for Private Education, only 41 percent of children who started grade 1 reached grade 5, and learning outcomes revealed only very basic abilities – less than 5 percent of grade 6 pupils can pass a basic literacy and numeracy test.

An optimistic goal of reconstruction efforts is to not only regain access to schools but to expand access beyond previous levels. However, the issue of access is proving to be extremely complex. The capacity of the education system to cope with the rise of disabled and traumatized children is of serious concern. In addition, many families can no longer pay schools fees, and without this financial support, schools cannot afford salaries of teachers, who are in desperate need. To complicate things further, in many areas, schools grounds are being used to house temporary camps and settlements of displaced people, who are themselves in desperate need of help.

April 5th marked the official reopening for earthquake affected schools, an as of May 5th, the Ministry of Education reported that 75 percent of children enrolled prior to the earthquake have returned to school. However, these numbers are much lower in heavily affected areas. The Municipal Office for Education in Petit and Grand Goave – two areas hit hard by the earthquake – reported that only 58 out of 318 primary schools have reopened (approximately 18 percent), and 2 out of 67 secondary schools have reopened (3 percent).

To assist schools with teaching, the Haitian government has created and adapted curriculum which attempts to incorporate guidelines for psychosocial support and disaster risk reduction along with accelerated learning approaches.

Working alongside Haiti’s Ministry of Education is the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (ISAC) Education Cluster, a consortium of different organizations and groups including UNICEF, the Ministry of Education, teacher associations and international and local non-governmental organizations (including the organization I currently work for). The Education Cluster has provided nearly 2,500 school tents and created 200 learning spaces covering more than 200,000 children. These efforts have focused on providing a transitional solution to rebuilding the education system until more long-term services can be put into place.

It took only 35 seconds for an earthquake to demolish Haiti’s education system, but it will take years upon years to bring adequate education to Haiti.

Nevertheless, there is an opportunity to not only repair but to revitalize an education system that was broken long before the earthquake ever happened. Early education, in particular, should be a top priority and could benefit from a more balanced private-public system, in which the government should take on a larger role to provide more public oversight, incentives, and accountability. The hope in what will definitely be a long road to recovery remains in the guidance of the Haitian government, the continued commitment of the international community, and the resilience of the Haitian people.