Programs: The first of our core programs is schools builds. We partner with local communities and governments to improve the state of education infrastructure in communities. Our short term goals are to address the need for improved infrastructure with our long term goals being to improve student attendance, progression, and test scores. The beneficiaries of our school building program are primary school students currently attending school in poor quality structures and primary school teachers currently teaching in poor quality structures. Through the end of 2014, we have broken ground on a total of 257 schools across our geographies.
our second core program is our wash program. Wash is an internationally recognized and utilized program that is designed to provide access to and knowledge about water, sanitation, and hygiene. Unicef adopted wash in 2005 as their primary intervention to tackle hygiene needs in the developing world; pop began wash practices in 2010 in laos. In carrying out this program, we build student and teacher sanitation facilities (sinks and bathrooms) in conjunction with classroom builds. In addition, our staff visit classes twice per month during the school year to teach lessons related to water, sanitation and hygiene. The primary goals of this program are to build and provide access to quality toilets, potable water and hand washing stations in conjunction with pop schools lacking such infrastructure. Additionally, we aim to increase proper hygienic and sanitary behavior in primary students.
our third core program is teacher support. We support teacher development through in-service and workshop training sessions. Our staff visit government teachers in our communities twice per month to aid in lesson planning, methodology training and rapport building with students. Teachers attend workshops for group training and network building. We use a methodology of teaching that focuses on the engagement of the student because more engaged students perform at a higher level. We do this through an expressive pedagogy, which involves usage of facial expressions, motor memory (song, dance, sign, etc. ) and creative didactic materials. The short term goals of our teacher support programs are: to improve lesson planning by assisting teachers in the creation and use lesson plans; to build rapport with students by encouraging teachers to adopt our interactive methodology to better engage students; to support a peer network of teachers through teacher training workshops, and; to provide classrooms with teaching and learning materials. Our long term goal is to increase primary student scores in literacy, numeracy and english across all our geographies. The main beneficiaries of our teacher support program are the teachers and students in our schools and communities. Through 2014, we have supported over 350 teachers in seven communities in laos, 11 in ghana and 16 in guatemala.
our fourth core program is our scholarships program. We support the progression of students from primary to secondary school by providing scholarship packages. Communities are selected as eligible for scholarships based on the results of the scouting rubric; at which point all students in the final grade of primary school are eligible to apply. Students in their final year of primary school with 75% attendance at the mid-year mark receive a prize (reading books, pencils, etc. ) and students with 75% attendance at the end-year mark receive the following scholarship package: tuition for first year of secondary school, a uniform, a backpack with school supplies, textbooks and paid dormitory fee when applicable. The key beneficiaries of our scholarship program are teachers and students in our communities. Since inception of this program, we have provided over 2,500 scholarships to students in need in our geographies. With all of our programs, we extensively monitor and evaluate our program impact. To best judge how effective our impact is, we closely monitor and evaluate (m&e) our programs on the ground. We have local m&e teams who conduct interviews and surveys with village leaders, teachers, students, and parents. This help us to understand the needs of villages in which we operate, our impact on the community, and areas in which we can improve pop operations and programming. Our student database helps us understand who we are serving every year in our pop schools. We document each pop student's name, age, gender, ethnicity, attendance, progression to next grade level, and grade in class. Each year, we track village-wide student enrollment, attendance, retention from one grade to the next, progression from primary to secondary school, and grades and/or test scores. We expect to improve these metrics through the variety of educational programs we offer students and communities. In addition, we follow individual pop students through the years to assess their educational successes and failures, along with their understanding, attitude, and behavior regarding education and elements of wash. These yearly interviews will help us understand the impact that we have on individuals through our programming. Domestically, we expanded our global communities through several updates to our website and through our expanding outreach program across our digital platforms to both youth and professionals. We have an online community of over 550,000 members who stay engaged with our work through updates, posts and blog entries.
