La Palmera C.C.C. | Christian School

“La Palmera” CCC Christian School

Teaming church, neighbors and educational local authorities to educate children.

La Palmera C.C.C.

Education is the major component of “La Palmera” C.C.C. community work. Its main purpose is to defeat, in the name of the Lord Jesus, ignorance and inequality of opportunities in a country highly marked by its poverty, social elites and gender discrimination.

Initially, La Palmera C.C.C. provided an opportunity for children attending the neighboring local public school to have access to educational reinforcement and encouragement in their schooling process. Schools in Bolivia suffer critical infrastructure needs and run under severe political struggles that perpetuate a vicious circle of educational mediocrity creating a horrendous rate of school desertion and national illiteracy that puts Bolivia amongst the most educationally neglected countries in the world.

In 1994, the Bolivian Government implemented a law for the educational reforms of its school system and La Palmera CCC supported this intention by offering to its current project’s children in primary school access to a formal education for P-1, P-2 & P-3 certified by the Minister of Education. To this we added: a school canteen, health support, assistance in school homework, access to small library of reference books, ludic educational activities, personal development assemblies, camps, spiritual retreats, excursions and organized visits to places of interest. The plan was to grow year by year with these initial groups until completing the full school system for Primary and Secondary Education (Kindergarten - High School).

Main Courtyard

The activities were planned in such a way that all families in the neighborhood, interested in enrolling their children in the program will find it absolutely friendly and supporting in their most basic felt needs. People in Bolivia are used to only four hours of schooling daily with boys attending in the morning and girls in the afternoon. La Palmera C.C.C. offered a school service of eight hours daily, therefore, providing full support to most working parents. This proposal was based on a special educational program 100% Christian & Bible centered aimed to provide to the children the larger picture of God’s plan for their lives through schooling. Our school is registered with the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI - www.acsi.org)

We promote education for life. We’ve also committed ourselves to compensate for the historical marginalization of women in the Latin American society, by giving to girls a higher chance to be enrolled and succeed in their schooling with our enthusiastic support. Another commitment we took was to provide to children the right to enjoy a minimum of 200 days of schooling yearly in a country where 100 days was acceptable due to the continual conflicts with teachers’ unions.

New Courtyard (2004)

Our goal is to be the first ones in Bolivia to materialize a dream: our own community Christian school, a partnership between government, neighbourhood and church!

We launched this new project in 1996, with the assistance of Dr. Louvenia Magee Gafney, an American consultant specialist on primary education and the active participation of Sra. Arminda Ortiz one of the first teacher supervisors trained in the new educational reform by its own Bolivian ideologist and minister of education Dr. Enrique Ipiña.

Today, we provide primary and secondary education (preschool - 12th grade) to 350 children from 5-18 years old and we are the only evangelical private school in town operating under agreement with parents and government.