The Dominican Republic has recently seen an increase of COVID cases and the newly elected Minister of Education announced that classrooms will be closed until further notice. We are working closely with the director and teachers at our school to ensure they have everything they need to provide home-based learning to our students.
Our teachers are currently being trained to be able to teach online and have each received a new laptop to help with this. Online learning for our students will begin in November but as you can imagine we have many concerns with this plan mostly given we are dealing with a third world country with unreliable wifi and of course many students don't have a device to receive the learning. The government has said they will help with the devices but what we have learned in our many years of working in the DR that things don't happen as fast as they are promised so we are working on a plan to get each of our students a tablet for online learning.
There has been no end date set for the online learning but we imagine it will go till at least end of winter/early spring.
We are still funding the operational expenses of our schools, now which include security guards for both schools. Another round of food packages will be prepared in the coming weeks as well. Stay tuned for more updates!