The Colegio Español Padre Arrupe is located in one of the poorest areas of El Salvador. The first places in the tests of high school belong to them. What your secret? Quality training, discipline, and to achieve the “avoid street”
If there is a mantra that is repeated in the analysis of international tests such as PISA is that the poor take worse notes. It is not said so clear, but that is often resorted to euphemisms such as “pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are placed in the percentile with worst results…”. Then comes the reflection relevant on how to help them.
“We showed that this need not be so: it is a lie, and if what we have been able to do here, what we could do on any site”, argues Aurora Rato Salazar-Simpson, president of the Fundación Padre Arrupe. The institution manages the Spanish School of Soyapango. Although it is located in the second district more depressed of The Savior, the center always manages to be among the best in the country. “Do you know the maras mentioned Donald Trump as the most dangerous in the world? As are those that surround our school.”
The passion for the education of the poorest of the poor comes from his uncle, Juan Ricardo Salazar Simpson, a jesuit, engineer and pedagogue. “When he met father Ellacuría, convinced him to go to El Salvador, to take the part of engineering of the University of Central American,” he explains.
Moving to El Salvador in the 90’s was to go to a country with the extension of Badajoz, the population density of the Community of Madrid… and, in the civil war. “There were refugee camps on any site, of people fleeing the war. My uncle helped them to not come down the houses, and gave spiritual support,” recalls Dawn.
The peace was signed in 1992. It was then when she persuaded her brothers to buy some land and donate it to a foundation. Well, have last 26 years and the Colegio Español Padre Arrupe has finished second in the national tests end of high school, fajándose with schools aristocrats of a country in which there is hardly any middle class. What’s the secret? A few well-trained teachers, with high expectations for the children and a speech effort, anything sweetened for the students.
class=”icon-foto_16_g”> The Spanish School has finished this year second in the national tests of high school.
The secret are a few well-trained teachers, with high expectations for the children and a speech of effort,
How do they do it? “The follow-up of the family is very important. We have a training school for parents, you learn by osmosis and you can’t teach something that you don’t know. We realized that the children were not in compliance with the objectives. Were not surrendering, we slept, and we saw what they ate. The parents had regrets for not being with them and gave them a dinner a bag of potato chips instead of beans. Teach them the nutritional food pyramid,” recalls Dawn.
The school was free the first year. It didn’t work. The children missed school and some parents not paying interest. Now it is charged in function of the economic possibilities: “does Not pay the same to the driver of a bus that a single mother who collects junk,” says the president of the Foundation.
Juan Ricardo Salazar Simpson died in 1999; his sister’s Happiness, the mother of Aurora, passed away two years ago. Aurora picked up the baton of the project that his uncle spoke to him in their holiday Spanish, when he came to raise funds to put the college in the elite of the country. Where it is already.
“This year to Fernando Andrés Gil , one of the students, have given him a prize in the Academy of Sciences of New York”, presumed to Aurora. “We have many children in the world, who have earned it, with a merit brutal. Are children who would have changed the life with the education”.
it Is the miracle of the hill of Soyapango.
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