The Panamanian School System (FREEHOP: Education #1)

The next installment in our FREEHOP series will be an overview of the Panamanian School System (if you don’t know what FREEHOP is, click here). The Panamanian school year started this month so we thought we should share with everyone what we have learned so far.

The Panamanian school system is administered by the Ministry of Education or MEDUCA. On a national level, MEDUCA regulates curriculum for all courses and at all grade levels. Beginning this year, MEDUCA is also distributing new backpacks to all students and providing parents with about $20 per child to help with the purchase of school supplies and school uniforms (that may not sound like much, but a lot of Panamanians make around $1-2 per hour).

In Panama, all students are required to attend school through the ninth grade; before 1990, students were only required to attend school through sixth grade. Children begin their education at age 5 with pre-kinder (preschool), followed by kinder (kindergarten) and primaria (like elementary school and includes grades 1-6). School buildings for these grades are fairly well distributed throughout the country which allows for good access. However, some primarias are so small that only one teacher teaches several if not all of the grades if the student base is not large enough to employ more than one teacher. The primaria in our community is slightly larger so we have one teacher that works with the kinder grade, one teacher who teaches 1st, 2nd, and 6th grades, one teacher who teachers 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades, and one teacher who teaches the English classes for all of these grades. I don’t exactly know why the grades are split the way that they are, but maybe there is a good reason for it.

Educators for these grades are called maestros (teachers) and attend 2 to 3 years of university to become certified to teach at primarias.  The maestros that work at our community’s school do not live in the community. During the school year these teachers commute up to 2 hours each way through a series of buses and possibly their own cars. One of the members of our community is a primaria teacher for a nearby school where he teaches kinder through sixth grade by himself. In other communities, teachers who are not able to commute to the school each day often live together in a MEDUCA house in the community Monday to Friday, then return home to their personal house on Friday afternoon. This was the case in our old community, where the 1.5-2 hour chiva ride each way made it impossible to commute daily. The female teachers lived together in a house during the week, and the male teachers lived together in a different house. Then everyone left midday on Friday afternoon.

After primaria, students attend premedia where grades 7, 8, and 9 are taught. Panamanian students make similar adjustments to their American counterparts when they reach middle school age. Students attend subject based classes taught by professors who teach specific courses (Spanish, Math, Physical Science, Social Science, English, etc.). However, one big distinction is that several students have to leave their community to attend premedia. Our community has a premedia that is fed by primaria schools throughout the region. A larger, and I must say quite nice, school bus makes two trips each direction, each school day to transport approximately 50 children to and from the premedia school in our community. Additionally, there are about 30 students who live in dormitories on the school campus during the week (Monday through Thursday nights) and eat all of their meals at the school cafeteria. Our school employs four people (2 men and 2 women) to watch and support these children who live at the school four nights a week.

Educators who teach at the premedia are referred to as Profesors and they attend between 4 and 5 years of university level education to earn the title of Profesor. They are also paid more than maestros.

After premedia comes media or the American equivalent to high school. Since education is compulsory only through ninth grade, high school is optional and can take on different forms for different students. Some Panamanian High Schools are geared towards students who are headed towards university while some schools provided vocational training. The closest high schools to our community are located in Las Tablas, the provincial capital of our province of Los Santos, which is approximately 30-40 minutes away by bus.

Here are a few other quick facts about schools in Panama:

• School days are roughly five hours long. In our community school starts just after seven and wraps up just after one.
• All students are required to wear school uniforms. Primaria children wear white shirts with navy blue pants or skirts and premedia and meida children wear light blue shirts with navy blue pants or skirts.
• We have seen very few textbooks and printed workbooks in Panamanian classrooms. We have been told that parents are responsible for purchasing any textbooks or school supplies that their children need.
• Private schools can also be found in Panama primarily in the larger cities. These schools can be quite expensive. The director of the school in our community told Kate and I that some of Panama’s best private schools teach most of their classes in English to prepare their students to attend universities abroad.

We will write another post soon to talk about what we will be doing in the schools and to provide more insight into the Panamanian school system.