23691: (pub) radtimes: Haiti Educators Are Despondent Over Conditions (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: radtimes <resist@best.com>

Haiti Educators Are Despondent Over Conditions

http://www.latimes.com/news/education/la-fg-haitischools1nov01,1,848903.story?coll=la-news-learning

Schools have gone from 'bad to worse' as unrest keeps funding and students
away.

November 1, 2004
By Carol J. Williams, Times Staff Writer

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Outside the rusted gates of a boys elementary
school, Acelin Lazarre peddles pencils, notebooks and lunch boxes.

When the streets are quiet, she can earn 25 to 30 gourdes, less than a
dollar but enough to save school fees for her daughter and buy their single
daily meal of rice or macaroni.

On a day when fighting between rival gangs and police closes the schools
and empties the streets of potential buyers, Lazarre loses a few days'
tuition, 14-year-old Lovely falls behind in her studies and they both go
hungry.

Like most adults in Haiti, where 90% of the population lives in dire
poverty, Lazarre is struggling for her child's education. In a nation where
53% of those 15 and older can read and write, political unrest has
accelerated the decline of Haiti's schools, clouding children's prospects
for an education.

Gunfire that rakes poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince has scared away
many students, said Michel Metellus, principal of Liberia National Public
School.

Since Sept. 30, when the latest wave of unrest broke out, classes have been
canceled most days because neither students nor teachers wanted to risk
trying to get to the downtown building.

"It goes from bad to worse. We need everything from chairs to books.
Parents have no jobs so they can't afford to pay the fees. We can't even
get the [state] financing we were promised because of the unrest," Metellus
said of the shootouts between police and supporters of former President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide who are demanding his return from South Africa.

A former priest, Aristide rose to prominence in the late 1980s, promising
to lift the masses from poverty through better education. He was elected
president in 1990, ousted a year later in a military coup, then returned to
power in 1994. A rebellion early this year drove him again into exile.

Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, remains economically paralyzed despite
the deployment in March of a U.S.-led stabilization force and a U.N.
peacekeeping mission that took over in June. Factories looted and burned in
the aftermath of Aristide's Feb. 29 departure lie in ruins. Gunmen
threatening police and others collaborating with the interim government
have managed to shut down the port, through which most commercial goods and
humanitarian aid passes.

Now teachers blame Aristide for the violence as well as for the crumbling
state of education.

"Those doing the shooting don't want the schools to function. They don't
want anything in the country to get back to normal," said Jean-Rodrigue
Lahens, who has taught at the Liberia school for 15 years.

Public schools like Liberia serve less than 25% of Haiti's students. The
rest attend private or parochial institutions for which parents must pay
monthly fees and annual tuition. Both public and private school students
pay for books, uniforms and enrollment.

Even at the public secondary school Lycee Marie-Jean where Lovely Lazarre
studies, the annual costs run about 2,500 gourdes, about $70 — or nearly
100 days of her mother's earnings.

Emmanuel Buteau, a former education minister in Aristide's government and
now head of private high school Les Normaliens Reunis, has grown despondent
about the quality of this country's schools through the 38 years he has
been teaching.

"It began when [former dictator Francois "Papa Doc"] Duvalier gave in to
pressure to accept all students in the public schools in the 1960s," Buteau
said. "Enrollment exploded but there were no new schools built so class
size went from 40 or 50 students to more than 150."

Private schools cropped up overnight, financed by parents fearful that the
crowding would hamper their children's education. A two-tiered school
system resulted, with the elite and the middle classes supporting private
schools and the poor attending underfunded state institutions.

Aristide's critics say he failed to keep his promises to improve education.

"For a year I tried to get his support for a plan of action, to build 20
new high schools, to make a reality of what had been promised. He had no
interest, and when I pushed he accused me of wanting to build schools so I
could become president myself," said Buteau, who joined Aristide's Cabinet
when the president was restored to power in 1994.

Education Minister Pierre Buteau — no relation to the private school
director — points out that public schools in the poorest communities
provide children with a hot lunch that is often the only food they get.
Each day school is canceled means tens of thousands of children don't eat,
he said.

The education minister said the interim government has earmarked the
largest share of $1 billion in humanitarian aid to support schools and
students. But most of the programs are hamstrung by the violence.

At the private Massillon Coicou School that offers kindergarten, elementary
and secondary education, a drastic drop in enrollment has meant faculty
layoffs and consolidation of six elementary grades into two classes.

Founder Denis St. Fort declined to say what percentage of his students
passed their state exams during the two-month unrest this year, deeming
that information "a commercial secret."

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