by Christina Ramirez

Yesterday was my first experience at the local school board meeting. Our school has one teacher/principal and 25 children under her care from grades 2 through 6 (ages 7 to 12). This year there are no children in first grade, the year that they learn how to read, so she hopes this year will go pretty smoothly. School hours are from 7 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. with a 15-minute recess in the morning and half an hour lunch. Most schools don't have this extended schedule because they form two groups of students and rotate classes in the morning from 7 to 11 and from 11:30 to 3.

The students study the four basic subjects: Spanish, Math, Science and Social Studies. In the extended schedule they have time for Creative Circle and Sharing Time. On Thursdays the religion teacher comes for an hour or two. Every year the students take three final exams and three midterm exams. The list of the concepts that will be tested must be given to students at least a week before the exam. Students spend most of their time copying material in small groups of their same grade. Our school has two classrooms that were built about 6 years ago with a grant from the government. There are about 25 wooden desks in poor condition. The three small bathrooms that were finished last year already leak.

Every year the government pays for the teacher and for school lunch. This year the government will pay about 180 colones for each student each day for lunch. There are supposed to be 200 days of school per year. The Board of Directors and the Board of "Patronato," or Fundraising Board, met yesterday for the first time this year and had several decisions to make. The cook is paid through the Fundraising Board and she wants a raise from 25,000 colones a month to 30,000 colones a month (about $58 a month at 2007 exchange rate). The man who cuts the grass is being paid 5,000 colones per month but some want him to cut the grass only once a month instead of twice a month. The two boards made more than $580 this past December in a soccer match and "reinado" or pageant. They need to pay the electricity, about $5 a month, and they bought paint to repaint the school. The boards needed to decide who can finish painting because the man who was painting went to another job. He was paid $116 to start painting and has only done one coat inside the two classrooms. He was being paid 800 colones or $1.55 an hour to paint.

Finally, the two boards had to decide when to make the next fundraiser. They want to make a covered patio for the students to eat and play in because it rains about 10 months out of the year in our area. They estimate the work to be about $5000. They are not sure if they can raise that much money or not. The teacher suggested a bingo and I suggested a soccer game. The problem with a soccer match is that most teams want to play but then your town has to return the visit. Our town doesn't have a really organized team, but we do have a lighted soccer field, one of the two towns that do in our district. So we decided to try to do both. The bingo will be for the 16th and 17th of March. Usually each member of the two boards provides a prize for the bingo, but this year we decided to each give from 2,000 to 5,000 colones and put the money together to purchase a few prizes in Ciudad Quesada so there will be a better quality of prizes. The ten members of the board that were there are all committed to helping the school.

Those are all the facts, but I kept thinking about one thing that happened in the meeting. Some members were complaining that they had to do everything and that out of the 18 parents of school children, there were a few that never did anything. I suggested that if they don't have time to volunteer then they should donate money. Everyone just said, they won't donate and they won't help either, yet their children come and eat and need things just like all the others. So what to do in a dilemma like this? In the States, everyone knows that even though a kid is an immigrant, a pain in the neck, or whatever, every person that lives in that area pays for the school through property taxes, even if they rent. But property taxes are very low here compared to the US, and many people declare very low property values.

Living in Costa Rica I have heard that the government spends a good percentage of the budget on education, actually more than 25 percent of Costa Rica’s budget is earmarked for education, but in practice I don't see much direct effect of that in my village. There may be a higher percentage of the total budget allocated to schools, but the resulting amount is not enough to trickle all the way down to the rural local, elementary school level. The nearest high school, in Monterrey, does have English classes now, but they have to rotate schedules so that the students attend school for either the morning or the afternoon because there aren't enough teachers or facilities for all 300 students.

Someone once commented that maybe Costa Rica should have a more centralized school system, so that there aren't little rural schools all over the place, and have a regional school where kids go. In this way there wouldn't be so many duplicate expenses. In fact, in the Monterrey school district there are more than 20 small rural one- or two-room schools. If the government spends money on only sending one teacher for each school (at most $9,800 a year including insurance and all perks) and has a one-time (every 20 or 30 years) expense of a school building, it’s no wonder that they've decided not to try to bus in all the students (buy buses, hire bus drivers, admin for buses and drivers, maintain buses, etc.). Some children, to get to the center of Monterrey, would have to travel an hour or more each way. Maybe it would be worth the trip if the school could be super-excellent and they had computer classes, music classes, and enrichment courses and classes lasted all day, but my feeling is that kids would end up just not going to school. As it is, out of the 28 students that enrolled in the elementary school this year, only 25 attend. The other three students (all under 12 years old) are simply not attending this year. Meanwhile, we continue to figure out creative ways to maintain the school and hope that our bingo goes well this month.

The photo above is of our elementary school in Linda Vista. The school is in obvious need of painting.

This article is one of a series on life in the campo, or country living in Costa Rica, as my wife and I experienced it on our visits and after moving to Costa Rica. When visiting Costa Rica, we used to stay with our then-manager's family. He is Costa Rican, and Christina is his wife. We are Fred and Amy Morgan, originally from the US, and we bought a dairy farm in Costa Rica to plant trees in its pastures, then later caught a dream of turning all the land we can to permanently protected, sustainably maintained forest once the plantation trees have been harvested for profit. We make most of the wood from the plantations into furniture, flooring, and other wood products.

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