Educate Haitian Immigrant Children in the DR

We recently had the opportunity to attend a trauma training conference in Santiago, which we then gained knowledge and materials from that allowed us to do a training with our teachers. After sending staff to the training on trauma informed care for children, we have been working on implementing better discipline that is sensitive to past trauma children may have experienced. Teachers have started using behavior charts, to reward good behavior and give children a visual when their behavior is worsening, rather than immediately sending them out of the class.

We believe it will take multiple meetings and tranings with the teachers to be able to see what we hope to see in the implementation stage, but we are thankful that it has begun. While teachers wanted to vent and complain about frustrations they face, listening to the affects that trauma has on children and their behavior was helpful in encouraging them to express patience with such problematic students. a list of catch phrases such as, "Use your words" used at the pre-school level when students get frustrated were shared with the teachers as well

While we are fundraising to pay off the new school building, we are still working on getting our accreditation, so we don't need to rely on another school to enroll our students in the Dominican system. Once we have it, we might be the only Creole-Spanish language school with this targeted curriculum in the Dominican Republic!

Thank you for sticking with us and helping us make our dream of owning our own building and being a fully accredited Haitian Creole-Dominican Spanish school a reality!

Links:

• Our organization's home page
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• School Blog