Creating Educational Opportunity for Maya Children

As the 2015 school year comes to a close this week, our Primary Education Scholarships Project is moving into new territory. During the coming break from school, the project will begin a pilot tutoring initiative to help those students that, given the many difficulties they face, were unsuccessful in passing their grade.

Currently, about 15% of scholarship students do not pass to the next grade level. Our project manager, Johanny Queiju, hopes the tutoring will eventually help all students to pass: “…with the tutoring, our objective is to offer these students the opportunity to improve their school performance.”

Our initial reach will be limited, working with four struggling fourth and fifth grade students from the Chukmuk School. These students attend school through scholarships, but difficult circumstances pushed them off course during the school year. One fifth grade student, Yessica Paola, who suffers from a disability that has affected her since birth, recently changed schools and has struggled to adjust to her new environment, which in turn affected her studies. Ana, a fourth-grade student, performed much more poorly in school after her father left her family and she was left to take on more responsibility at home.

The new tutoring pilot will give students like Yessica and Ana the opportunity to study and make up the work for the classes they failed. It will help them avoid repeating a grade and instead start the next school year along with their peers. The project will be led by Isabela, a former scholarship student who, in part because of the support of Pueblo a Pueblo, was recently able to complete her schooling and become a certified teacher. The project has come full circle!