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Makin' the World a Better Place (video)

U.S. college students volunteer to teach English in impoverished Dominican Republic schools

  yang.yang@nyu.edu

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Students from U.S. universities used a recent spring break to teach English to poor and orphaned children in the Dominican Republic. Working with the not-for-profit Orphanage Outreach, they gave two daily English lessons in overcrowded primary school classrooms in the country’s rural northwest Jaibon/Laguna Salada region.

The Dominican Republic has one of the world’s worst primary education systems: the World Economic Forum’s 2009 Global Competitiveness Report ranked it dead last, among 134 countries. Unsurprisingly, the DR lags in education spending and primary school enrollment, too.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently travelled to the Dominican Republic to announce a five-year, $12.5 million dollar expansion of a U.S. Agency for International Development education program Clinton said would serve as a model for such programs in the region.

The program, called Effective School, has already trained more than 3,000 first through fourth-grade teachers, improving math and reading instruction in more than 200 Dominican schools. Now the program will operate in 450 schools, cover more subjects and bolster school administration.

For the time being, foreign volunteers provide the otherwise lacking English instruction in the rural schools Orphanage Outreach serves.

I traveled with the group to the Jaibon/Laguna Salada region, and documented the story of their work at a local primary school, the Centro Para La Niñez.

The not-for-profit Orphanage Outreach arranges for university students to teach English at poor rural Dominican Republic schools like this one. Photo by Yang Yang