Three Community School Refurbishment Project

La Remonta, Asiento Viejo, and Las Mesas are rural communities located within 20 km of Ciudad Darío. Seeds of Learning and volunteers have worked with all three communities in the past to build much-needed classrooms. Although these classrooms provide important educational opportunities through improved infrastructure, the time has come for additional maintenance work and refurbishment, and to supply the schools with more educational materials.

In 2016, SOL worked alongside the members of each community and international volunteers to carry out a three-part repair and refurbishment program. At each school, we did the following:

• Repaired the original classrooms built by Seeds of Learning in the mid-90s and early-00s. The construction work included repairs of structural damage and roof leaks, hardware replacement, painting, electrical installations, landscaping, and repair of latrines and sinks.
• Repaired and upgraded all school furnishings, such as student and teacher desks, white boards, books cases, tables and chairs, etc.
• Worked with each school community to provide much-needed educational materials. First, provided each school with an Edu-Corner, which consists of a corner bookcase stocked with text and reference books, storybooks and other learning aids. We also worked with teachers, parents and youth of the community to develop a Traveling Box program. This will provide a constant flow of new and borrowed books to the school and community. These two ongoing mini-programs will also include routine SOL staff visits to the schools, training workshops for program volunteers, scholarship student participation, and evaluation sessions.

The refurbishment project at La Remonta and Asiento Viejo schools were completed in December. At the request of the teachers at the La Remonta school, we combined our inauguration with the preschool and 6^th grade promotion ceremonies on Saturday, December 3^rd.

Although we had planned to also repair the Las Mesas school, City Hall announced that they would be taking on this work in 2017.

Be sure to check out our online photo albums of the La Remonta and Asiento Viejo construction projects. To view before photos of the schools, click here.

Special thanks: We thank Xarxes (Spain) for generously funding this project. We also thank the volunteers from Hawken School, Volcano Vista High School, and Davis Open for helping with the construction.