By Nuestra Escuela | Inc.
Since Hurricanes Irma and María struck Puerto Rico, the island’s nonprofit sector has continuously responded to crisis after crisis. After the hurricanes, a sequence of earthquakes shook the southern parts of Puerto Rico for weeks, and the COVID-19 pandemic ensued thereafter. Nuestra Escuela is not the same organization it was in 2017 or even in March of 2020. It is not news to anyone that the world has changed in unexpected and oftentimes dizzying ways. Come what may, however, our efforts have remained ever focused on ensuring the continuity of our services. Nuestra Escuelas has remained operational and continues to offer its services without interruption. This is possible because Nuestra Escuela has worked on building new ways of sharing, creating virtual work environments, providing access to information technologies to 100% of the students and staff who needed it, and supporting and training our team to work efficiently on virtual platforms. Nuestra Escuela has also undertaken an extraordinary investment of time and resources to successfully adapt its facilities to the prevention and distancing measures established by the CDC and local public health agencies.
This year has undoubtedly posed one of the most significant challenges we had to overcome in our 20-year history. Yet we showed up to this crisis with responsibility and a profound sense of duty to our students and the community we serve. Amid so much uncertainty, we celebrate the capacity of our community to listen to each other, to identify creative ways to respond to emergencies, to confirm again and again that providing quality education alternatives that are sustainable and resilient is possible. This is reflected time and again by each young person who attends their virtual classes and in the smiles of the boys and girls who complete their experiments with their teachers online. Our prevention and mitigation strategy focused on promoting comprehensive health and safety measured by leveraging our entire biopsychosocial support team, offering prevention material, supporting families and the community with fresh foodstuffs and financial aid, and held virtual yoga, music, theater, and physical exercise classes.
It has been a year of intense activity and work. It’s also been a year that required lots of patience from those who wish to serve their communities closely. Our urban construction projects were largely interrupted by lockdown and physical distancing measures and later by labor shortages in the construction sector in Puerto Rico. Fortunately, we were able to resume our “rebuilding school” project in May 2021. However, works on the first response center with solar energy remain halted because Nuestra Escuela’s top priority is to build additional classrooms and provide more space for physically distanced in-person learning. We hope to be resuming this project between July and August 2021.
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