Brief Report on the State of Education in the Mirebalais Region

By Marconi Médor

FATEM Program Coordinator

February 2011 - Over the past five years, the Central Plateau has had the lowest score on the Haiti national exams. This poor positioning at the bottom of the ladder, much complained about by some organizations engaged in the field of education in the area, is the result of several factors: lack of supervision with regards to the quality of courses taught in the classrooms, unqualified teaching personnel, lack of critical course books, and a deficit in terms of the availability of information.

Toward the end of 2010, FATEM took it upon itself to go after sensitive data regarding the education sector in the commune of Mirebalais, the second most populated of the Centre Department, in terms of population. These data are very important in that they will guide our intervention in our efforts to improve the educational system in the said commune. The results which we obtained reflect in several aspects the state of the education within the Department and at the national level.

We identified a total of 207 schools inside the city and in the four communal sections (or districts) of Mirebalais. The District of Grand Boucan, located at the Southwest entrance to Mirebalais has the largest number, 51 schools, representing 25% of all schools located in the area; downtown Mirebalais for its part has 54 schools.

The commune of Mirebalais has only 15 centers providing secondary education, and none of these centers are located in rural areas. To each of the city's public schools is annexed a third cycle that provides basic education. Also, it is worth noting that for the city and its four districts there is only one high school (lycée) serving students from the town of Saut d'Eau, Boucan-Carré, Savanette, and Lachapelle (the latter being a commune in the Department of Artibonite).

The student population in the commune of Mirebalais is roughly 41,592, of whom 20,355 are girls and 21,237 are boys. The center of town has the highest number of students: 18,578, followed by Sarazin, 8,025; Grand Boucan, with 7,568; Gascogne, with 4,385; and Crete Brulée with 3,066 students.

The number of teachers working in the Mirebalais area is about 1,716, an average of 8.28 teachers per school. Despite the difficult situation, these men and women have sacrificed other activities to focus daily on a profession that has been undervalued by a lot of Haitians today.

These numbers reflect in a clear and precise manner, the scope of the work that awaits any organization which chooses education as the main activity for social transformation in the Central Plateau region, in particular the Mirebalais area. Challenges such as schools that are almost physically nonexistent, administrative cadres that never existed, unqualified teachers, lack of interest on the part of the government, low level of interest on the part of parents in the education of children from the rural areas, have plagued our education system and weakened our value systems as well.