International Ministries
By Stuart Salazar, MEd, Regional Director, ACSI Latin America Region
Historically, the Dominican Republic has experienced several firsts. It held North America’s first Spanish settlement, Santo Domingo, which became the capital city of the Dominican Republic. This city holds other firsts including the first cathedral and the first university in the Americas. The D.R., as this country’s name is commonly abbreviated in English, is also the first to contain Christian bilingual schools that are pursuing ACSI accreditation.
Last year the D.R. secretary of education sent an ultimatum to private bilingual schools: they had to start some kind of accreditation process if they wanted to keep their authorization to operate as such. In order to fulfill their constitutional mandate as overseers of all authorized schools under them, federal ministries of education in Latin America face the challenge of checking the quality of bilingual instructional programs. The Dominican authorities chose to let foreign accrediting agencies do this work for them, and ACSI is one of only five authorized agencies conducting accreditation among private schools. Six schools are currently in the process of becoming accredited by ACSI under the new REACH accreditation protocol specially adapted for the ACSI Latin America Region. Other schools in Mexico and Central America are following the example of the Dominican schools.
Several schools around the world are adopting bilingual education to effectively teach English to their students. This modality of education is becoming more popular in Latin America because of the nearness to the United States and because of the benefit that families see for their children to learn English as a second language—a benefit that opens opportunities to access international programs of higher education and better jobs. Schools teach English classes and some school subjects in English, along with using mandatory curriculum in Spanish.
Since no standards have been defined to check the quality of these bilingual programs, ACSI Latin America held a consultation on bilingual education during last May in Guatemala. School representatives and experts in the field discussed and set standards of what it takes to be an excellent bilingual school. The incorporation of these standards in the regional accreditation instrument will make ACSI an authoritative voice on bilingual school accreditation worldwide.
When Jorge Rivas, ACSI’s Latin America associate director for academic services, visited candidate schools in the Dominican Republic last year, the director for private education accreditation in the D.R. joined him for the school visits. After the second visit, Mr. Pedro de Jesús Magallanes said in a conversation with the author on November 28, 2008, “Compared with the other agencies doing accreditation in this country, the ACSI instrument is the most thorough process I have seen. It’s great to see high standards being applied since the beginning.”
ACSI has been serving Christian schools in the D.R. through a partnership with Centro Educativo Logos (CEL), a national organization founded by Lester Flaquer, an experienced educator who served as the first Latino on the ACSI Executive Board. Mr. Flaquer is also the headmaster of Logos Christian School, founded in 1985 and currently serving 326 students. He is a visionary leader who found in ACSI the resources to encourage educators and schools in his country to embrace and apply a true Bible-based philosophy of Christian schooling. Today, as the ACSI area director for the Caribbean, Mr. Flaquer is responsible for providing programs and services to more than 40 member schools.
ACSI has held annual teacher conventions and administrator conferences in the D.R. since 2000. Compared with the first convention, which had 70 teachers in attendance, this year’s convention gathered more than 600 who came to listen to Dr. Gary Damore from Southwestern College in Arizona and to hear other speakers. Other services offered in the Dominican Republic by ACSI include short-term mission teams, through which 20 member schools have been blessed in the past four years with the presence of one or more teams. School for Parents is another ACSI service on the rise; more than 600 parents have attended these seminars in the past two years. Mr. Flaquer also has been instrumental in leading a novel graduate program for Christian educators in partnership with Columbia International University and Universidad FLET.
As Christopher Columbus used Santo Domingo as the base to reach out to the rest of the new hemisphere, Mr. Flaquer expects to reach out through ACSI to the rest of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. In a report submitted to the author on August 25, 2009, Mr. Flaquer wrote, “Our hope is that this office will continue to be used and blessed by the Lord not only in our country, but in the neighboring Caribbean nations such as Puerto Rico and Cuba. In that way we will continue growing and spreading a true philosophy of Christian education.”
The ACSI office in Santo Domingo is one of three satellite offices of ACSI Latin America, an ACSI region established in 1990 and headquartered in Guatemala City. The other ACSI Latin America offices are located in São Paulo, Brazil, and Asunción, Paraguay.
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