Rural schools in Copán: what changes when the investment arrives

There is a difference that words explain badly and a single glance explains well: the difference between a rural school no one has reached in twenty years and one that has been reached.

On a recent visit to the mountain communities, the group from the club and from the International Project Alliance (IPA) went to both in the same morning.

The first: walls, tin roofing, and whatever holds

A block-and-render school with a patched tin roof, mesh windows and two classrooms for every grade. It works. The teachers are there — the State provides them — and the children walk in. But the building has been holding itself up for decades, and it shows.

This is the starting point for most schools in these communities, and it is worth saying plainly: it is not a ruin and it is not a tragedy. It is a school doing what it can with what it has.

The second: Escuela Rural Mixta Prof. Ricardo Aguilar F.

Founded in 1989, and today with work underway. What you see on arrival:

• The building repainted, with a mural on the façade and the school’s name painted large across it.
• A concrete path climbing from the road to the yard, edged with stone. Before it existed, that stretch turned to mud the moment it rained — and in the mountains, it rains.
• A new classroom, smaller, beside the main building.
• A wooden playground with a slide and swings.
• A retaining wall of stone and block holding up the yard, and chain-link fencing around it.

On the day of the visit there was still a cement mixer, a wheelbarrow and shovels in the yard: the work was not finished. That photograph — the one of the job half done — is probably the most honest of them all.

Why the concrete path matters as much as the classroom

This is the part that is hard to explain to anyone who has never made the climb. A concrete path is not a luxury or a finishing touch: it is what lets a six-year-old reach her classroom without mud to the knee, lets a pregnant mother get up the hill, lets a teacher carry materials without slipping, and keeps the school open in October.

It is also the logic IPA applies in its whole-village programmes: a water system without a school, or a school without a path, changes nobody’s life. Things hold together, or they do not hold at all.

What sits behind a school like this

IPA is a coalition of more than eleven Rotary clubs from District 5050 — the northwestern United States and southwestern British Columbia — whose counterpart in Honduras is the Rotary Club of Copán Ruinas. It works in 38 communities across the Copán Ruinas region, and education is the front with the roundest numbers.

According to reports from the foundation itself and from District 5050:

• Adopt-a-School: around 30 primary schools supported. Since 2015 the programme has delivered more than 8,000 backpacks to children in the region. Adopting a school costs between 400 and 500 dollars a year, about 20 dollars per child, and covers a backpack, uniform and supplies for the full school year.
• Adopt-a-Dream: university scholarships for more than 20 students.
• Secondary education: the programme supports some 520 secondary students, and in February 2023 the fifteenth new secondary school opened in Copán communities.
• School libraries, a mobile library and a technology fund.

Schools enter the programme on two criteria: the community’s need and the quality of its teachers. The State provides the teachers and, when it can, a daily snack; the programme provides the rest — materials, markers, dictionaries, paper — and, where the project allows, the building work.

What each party puts in

This deserves precision, because a project like this is never one party’s alone:

• The community puts in the land, the labour and the care afterwards. None of the above survives without that.
• The State puts in the teachers and the curriculum.
• IPA and the District 5050 clubs put in the funding.
• The Rotary Club of Copán Ruinas puts in what can only be put in from here: identifying the need, negotiating with the community, accompanying the work and answering for it afterwards.

That last part appears in no photograph, and without it a bank transfer from Washington does not turn into a school.

How to help

If you would like to support the club’s work in the region’s schools, or if your club or company would like to adopt a school, write to us. You can also see what the club works on and how the IPA alliance works.