School the World, Inc.

At School the World, we help support the teachers by building schools so they have a safe place to teach. We also deeply engage parents and local community so they can provide a quality learning experience to the children. Finally, we provide books & supplies and train teachers so they can provide quality learning experience to the children.

We deliver extensive monthly training to our teachers over two years using a tested and proven methodology developed by US AID (Centers for Excellence in Teacher Training or “CETT”). Our expert trainers work with teachers in groups once a month and visit each teacher for in-classroom training every month.

The training strives toward child-centric teaching with a special focus on methods for teaching literacy using supplemental reading materials. While CETT develops teaching skills, we build a culture of professional pride, peer influence and motivation with teaching prizes and best practices sharing.

The teachers in our schools are all local teams. They are personally invested in their nation’s educational progress and familiar with the challenges children and families face day in and day out. Our teachers also speak the native language, know the customs, and understand what it takes to keep our students motivated .

We challenge parents to begin investing in books by promising that School the World will multiply what they give by 5 in the first year, by 4 in the second year, by 3 in the third year, by 2 in the fourth year and by 1 in the fifth year. After 5 years, we have a full mini-library in every classroom!

These parents often support their entire families on less than $2 a day, but they are rising to the challenge. They organize around the incentive and pledge between $1.25 and $2.50 per child for books, sometimes in 2 installments.

We all know education begins in the home. And the more involved parents are, both in and out of school, the more a child is likely to learn. The majority of our parents cannot read or write, but they desperately want an education for their children. These parents have a tremendous influence over what happens in their local school, and we help them understand how best to use that influence.

With our parental engagement program, we organize parent meetings every two weeks. We engage them in discussion and strive for outcomes like a “code of care” for school property and peer-to-peer outreach to the parents of children who are not in school. And we educate them about some of the most important indicators of learning, such as instructional time.

One very important part of the equation for success is our ability to partner with local governments. Actually, we make it a requirement.

Every village we invest in, the local government donates the land, raw materials and/or labor to help with the school build. We supplement their resources with our expertise, resources and experience.

Partnering with the local community guarantees that everybody has a vested interest in the success of the school. Equally important, it creates a lasting culture that values education and progress.

We call them World Changers because of their passion for service and desire to drive change.

Students spend time before their spring or summer break fundraising for a nine-day service trip in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. Funds they raise go directly towards buying materials and supplies to build a school or playground in a Guatemalan village. Students visit the community to participate in the actual construction process and complete in time to join the dedication ceremony.

Each group that travels completes 1 new school building during their journey of discovery. We also believe cultural exposure and understanding is an important part of our program. During their trip, students experience the wonders of the Mayan world, visit the Spanish colonial city of Antigua, climb the active Pecaya volcano, explore a local coffee farm and barter in the largest open air market in Central America.

During their trip, our student travelers begin to open their eyes and minds to the deep, complicated causes underlying poverty and gender discrimination prevalent in the rural villages. They also walk away with first hand insights to economic realities that force mothers and fathers to send their young children across our treacherous borders. More importantly, they experience the power and influence of education in ordinary people’s lives.

We take success very seriously. That is why we measure student achievement in the most reliable way possible, through testing at our schools and at similarly situated control schools. We test at the beginning of the teacher training program, again at the end of the first year, and again at the end of the second year of teacher training. After just one year, our schools are outperforming the control schools in both reading and math.

But we use test results for a lot more than that. We analyze the results to look for patterns – patterns that often tells us about how kids, teachers and schools are performing and sometimes even why. We take these learnings and optimize our program so we are continuously improving and creating positive change.

6,464 students enrolled!

We recognize there is a gap between girls and boys when it comes to access and expectations.

Giving girls access to education is the first of many steps essential to reducing gender discrimination and breaking down gender barriers. It is not uncommon to see families send only their sons to school, leaving the girls to domestic duties and childrearing. As a result, girls are more susceptible to be left behind in poverty and continue to be dependent on their families for support. Providing access to education allows girls to have the skills they need to negotiate key life decisions and to have the license to seek lifestyles and choices that are not bound by prescribed gender roles.

We have high expectations for our girls and expect the same from our students and their families. Our program reinforces girls' commitment to their own education, works with girls to develop essential life skills and increases support for girls’ education among their parents, school staff, and communities.