Thursday, November 12, 2015

Developing Schools of Excellence…

HFK Logo With White (2)You might be aware of Hope for Kidz, our child sponsorship program.  Just the highlights…  We have over 2000 children sponsored and receiving an education (Tuition, books, shoes, uniform, etc), over 5000 children eating a Hot Lunch every school day and next week we will be providing health education and deworming to over 17,000 children!  We couldn’t be more excited!

One could say that helping a child get to school is only half of the battle.  The other half is making sure they receive a Christ centered quality education.  We are focusing more and more on making sure this happens.  Here are just a few things we are doing toward this end…

Teacher Training – We want our teachers trained.  It’s a desperate need.  We have partnered with an organization who specializes in training Haitian teachers.  Our desire is for all of the teachers and school directors form our partner schools to get advanced training.  Right now, as I write, we have 75 teachers who are sitting in training.  By the end of tomorrow, they will have finished modules #1 through #8 out of 12.  These 75 teachers are now into their second year of the 2 year program.  It’s exciting to watch!  We can’t wait to roll out this same training to many more teachers starting fall 2016.  More to come…

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Monthly School Visits – Once a month, a member of our Partnership Facilitation team visits each school.  While there, they observe, create reports, provide oversight and accountability.  These observations and reports are a significant step in helping us understand the issues at hand.

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NEW Hope for Kidz Monitor – We have recently added a position to our HFK team to help us gain deeper insight and to respond more quickly to observed needs in the lives of each of our sponsored children and partner schools.  There is a story behind every child and every school.  We want to know these stories so we can address child and school/educational development needs more quickly and effectively.  This position exists to supervise, monitor, develop, and hold accountable all Hope for Kidz children, schools, teachers and school directors.  In response to observations made, recommendations will be made, and quickly addressed.  We are immediately addressing specialized teacher training needs with seminars.  We will be watching and making recommendations on changing systems, schedule, curriculum, discipline, etc.  We will be noting the absence of supplies, facilities and teaching aides and looking for ways to address these deficiencies.

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Resourcing Schools – Because our Hope for Kidz program is done within the context of our Church Partnerships, we are able to collaborate with our US Partners to bring much needed resources to our Haitian schools. Did you know that we are actively building 2 schools right now?  Did you know that we just provided 6 blackboards and 6 teacher’s desks to another school? Did you know that we just built a bathroom facility for another school?  We love being able to partner with local churches and schools to provide the resources they need to provide a quality education.

We are incredibly excited about our initiatives to develop Schools of Excellence.  Please pray and join us.