The Dominican government has announced that schooling in the 2020-2021 academic year will be fully virtual. Despite the promise of a laptop and internet to all families with school-aged children, communities like Batey Libertad, which are home to Haitian immigrants and their children, are critically under-resourced. Even without COVID, our local public school lacks teachers, space and resources. Yspaniola will help ensure that students do not miss out on vital learning as schools go virtual.
Children in Batey Libertad are facing a fully-virtual school year with limited technological experience, significant food insecurity, and limited measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. For students who have not yet mastered the basic skills of reading and writing, virtual learning will be incredibly difficult, since they will experience barriers to engaging with the materials provided and will not be able to rely on physically present teachers to help them.
We will use the funds raised by this campaign to: 1) Provide in-person tutoring to students who have not yet mastered reading and writing, in a COVID-19 safe environment with one teacher for every three students, from October through December, 2) Purchase three temperature machines to monitor student health before sessions, 3) Provide nutritional support to families in the batey by sending students home from sessions with food packages.
This project will ensure that emerging readers who need extra support to dominate phonetics and progress to reading fluency will receive the educational and emotional support necessary to do so. By using tablets and computers in our classes, students will become more confident with technology and accustomed to using it to meet educational goals. This will help prevent students from falling further behind as a result of COVID-19, which is currently the greatest risk facing our students.
