Cloud Forest School in Costa Rica

"We don't learn to love the earth by reading books on the subject, nor books on integral ecology. Our own experience is what counts. To plant and live through the growth of a tree or a plant, walking the city streets, or venturing into a forest, feeling the birds’ chirping on sunny days, or who knows, watching how the wind sways the plants, feeling the warm sand on the beaches, gazing at the stars on a dark night.”
-Pedagogy of the Earth and Culture of Sustainability by Moacir Gadotti
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On Friday we visited the Cloud Forest School, which was by far my favorite of our field visits. The mission of the school is "to encourage a new generation of ecologically aware, bilingual individuals with the skills and motivation to make environmentally and socially conscious decisions on a local, national, and global scale." The school is located in the cloud forest of Monteverde:


The playground built by volunteers:


The school strives to be sustainable in various areas. These are their school buses next to the shed that is home to their bio diesel laboratory.
They also have a green house where students bring in species of plants that have fallen over after heavy rain.



They have a vegetable garden, which is enriched by the school's compost pile, where students bring in scraps of food from home to add to the mix.
The school has a tree nursery as a part of their reforestation project. Every person that visits the campus gets to plant a tree.
All twenty people from our class planted trees at the campus, including me:

Planting a tree on a school campus in Costa Rica was a spiritual experience for me and many others. All week we have been discussing the interconnectedness of humanity in addition to our relationship with the environment, and participating in and walking around the Cloud Forest School exemplified this. As I planted my tree, I thought about how I would forever have a relationship to this school, how I could further my personal practices of sustainability, and how I could try to further their mission by inspiring my future students in these same areas of sustainability.

The finished product:

The Justice League (AKA my fellow master's students):

The visit to the Cloud Forest School provided a stark contrast to the public school, Escuela El Rodeo, that we visited earlier in the week. First, it is a private school. The budget of the Cloud Forest School is about $300,000 per year, excluding salaries. The budget of the public school is $1,000 per year, excluding salaries. Most students are on partial financial aid, but it still costs money to attend the Cloud Forest School, which provides a challenge for some families.

Public schools are becoming less and less prominent in Costa Rica, as families are opting to use their money to send their kids to better schools. This is creating an interesting dynamic and provides less opportunities to the children who do attend public school. Because tourism is the number one industry in Costa Rica, those who go to public school are at a disadvantage upon graduation due to their lack of English skills.

While the discrepancy in education was discouraging to witness, it was inspiring to see a school as innovative and unique as the Cloud Forest School. It was one of the most impressive schools I have seen anywhere in the world. The average class size is 16 students, with a maximum of 22 students in high school. Students interact constantly with nature and the environment, taking ownership over the activities that I have mentioned here. If only this school could become a model that is duplicated throughout Costa Rica and the world.

Where I Volunteered this Past Semester

For the past five months, I have been volunteering every Tuesday night at the Barrio Logan College Institute (BLCI) in Barrio Logan, which is a predominantly low-income Hispanic neighborhood in San Diego. This past Tuesday was my last night there, because I will be starting an internship this semester, so I wanted to write a post about the BLCI, because I greatly believe in what they do for children and youth.

The average family income in Barrio Logan is $19,000, and it has one of the lowest education rates in San Diego. All of the students who go to the BLCI will be first generation college graduates and 99% of them are Latino. Latinos are largely underrepresented in college campuses throughout the country. Among adult Latinos who are 25 years of age and older, only 10.9% are college graduates. The BLCI consists of after-school tutoring, classes to improve educational skills, extracurricular activities, assistance with applying to college and financial aid, and parent involvement. It also places these students in quality schools, such as highly ranked public or charter schools.

During my short time at the BLCI, I was able to meet some extremely promising youth who were very committed to going to college. They would tell me about other kids in their neighborhood who were involved with drugs or in gangs, but these students were dedicated to coming to the BLCI. Commitment for them meant some nights staying till 8:00 p.m., going to schools away from their neighborhood that were much more challenging academically, taking classes at the BLCI, and being tutored, all so they could have more opportunities than their parents did. It is a shame that there are not more programs like this throughout the country supported by government funding.

If you want to show your support to the Barrio Logan College Institute, sign up for their newsletter here: http://www.blci.org/. They raise all of their funds through private donations, so it attracts large donors if they have a lot of people on their newsletter list. It’s an easy way to support a good cause.

Economic Recession: Human Capital vs. Financial Capital

Robert Reich, UC Berkeley Professor of Policy and former Secretary of Labor, read a great piece he authored yesterday on NPR. Read it on his blog under December 3.

In summary, he said that while the government is working to back up our country’s financial capital, our human capital is being neglected. The federal government is ensuring that financial institutions, banks, and car companies are being funded, but where is the bailout for schools, which as a whole are losing money? Teachers are being laid off, after school programs cancelled, class sizes increased, “non-essential” classes cut, and college tuition fees raised.

I whole-heartedly agree with Reich. Currently, I am on my lunch break from substitute teaching at Escondido High School. In the first class I taught, out of 33 students, 11 turned in their homework, and out of those 11, only 4 had it completed. It caused me to wonder, based on Reich’s words: Are our youth failing in school or is our school system failing our youth? Should a group of 16 year olds be expected to care about education when the government time and time again has failed to see it as a high priority?

The government speaks of these financial bailouts as if time is of the essence. So too should it be with our schools. The negative ramifications of a poor education are not easily reversed. Money isn’t everything, but as a former teacher, I can say that it does help a lot. In these increasingly challenging times, there is hope for our world, but it lies within our children, not within the banks.