Day 4 in Puerto Rico: Visiting the Schools

Today was what this trip was really all about: seeing the schools and connecting with teachers. We visited Abraham Lincoln Elementary, a public school in Old San Juan, and were able to see some classrooms and talk with the principal and some teachers.


It was such a great experience. The school is in a high risk community and is made up of both students from the community and students who live out of the community but have parents that work nearby in the government buildings. They have a mix of social classes ranging from the mid and low economic families of the local community and higher economic families who live outside the community. This school only has one of each grade level, including a pre-school class.

One of the most beneficial experiences of this trip was being able to sit down and talk with classroom teachers. I was talking with another third grade teacher, who didn't speak much English, and the primary level English teacher. What really stuck out for me was how similar their school is to ours. Puerto Rico's schools are held to the same No Child Left Behind standards that we are only it is more challenging because they also have to be proficient in English. Students receive 50 minutes of English language instruction a day and all other subjects are taught in Spanish. We were discussing family involvement in the school and it was a lot of the same things that you would expect to hear from schools in York county. Parent involvement and support can go either way. The majority of the parents support the teacher outside of the classroom. There is a mix of parents who help their children with their school work and those parents that do not typically help their children at home are not necessarily those from the lower income community. In this school there are no buses so parents pick the students up and they often talk to the teacher at that time. As you would expect those parents who may constantly hear that there was a problem with their child may become upset and stop coming up to the door to get their child. I think this reinforces the need to set up that positive line of communication. Teachers need to find positive things to tell parents before any problems and it is most beneficial if you try to tell positive things more often than negative things. Parents are involved in the school and do volunteer in the classroom. The use of parent volunteers is really dependent upon the teacher's preference, most prefer not to have many parents in the classroom, and availability of volunteers varies. Sometimes it is very difficult to get volunteers and other times you have volunteers who are always ready to help. The teacher we spoke with said they have a lot of compromised parents, but most are very involved.

Talking with the teachers and discussing teaching strategies was such a valuable opportunity. It sounds like schools in Puerto Rico are making progress but are slightly behind the educational trends and movements in the states. Throughout our discussions I kept hearing it really depends on the teacher. In Puerto Rico students are expected to read by third grade, but because testing doesn't really happen until third grade students could enter third grade without being able to read depending on the teachers they had. In the states we are constantly monitoring student progress, sometimes it feels like we over-test them, and are using Response To Intervention strategies and programs to support students from early on up. I couldn't imagine a student entering my third grade class not being able to read. Also in the states, there is a big push for student-centered instruction that utilizes choice and the multiple intelligences. There are teachers in Puerto Rico who use these teaching philosophies, but it doesn't sound like it is the big movement that it is in the states. At this point of the discussion I was only talking to the teacher who spoke little English so my impressions could be slightly askew from the reality. I would have loved to see a classroom in action to get a better understanding or at least had more time to talk with teachers and visit their classrooms. It was such a shame that the start of school had to be post-poned due to preparing a plan of action for the swine flu. I am really excited about the opportunity to continue this connection we made with teachers in Puerto Rico and am hoping to continue a line of communication throughout the school year.




After leaving the school we were invited to tour the community of La Perla. This is closed community outside the city walls. It is a rather poor community and is considered a "ghetto," in fact we were told that we could only go into the community by being invited and guided by the community leader because it would not be safe for us otherwise. Although this sounds like scary place, you could see and feel a great deal of pride in the community from the community leader and the efforts they are making to improve their community. It was a real honor to invited into this community.



This community is 29 blocks, but we only had time to see a small section of it. This community seems very self contained. In the small section that we visited, there was a community center (top row, left) that is used mostly for tutoring, a family center (top row, right), a head start center (second row, left), and a medical center (third row, right side) that is capable of performing small surgeries.

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As you can see, La Perla has a beautiful view. Unfortunately that view is causing the government to attempt to take the land back in order to build resorts. What a shame!