Inter-America: Educators Commit To Improving Adventist Educational System

Miami, Florida, United States….[Libna Stevens/IAD]

Education, many believe, shapes a generation. The leaders of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the Inter-American Division (IAD) are no exception. Dozens of IAD educators and leaders met for a four-day summit earlier this month to examine the present Adventist educational system and to set the course of education in the IAD for the next 10 to 15 years.

Concerned with shaping the next generation of students and leaders, summit attendees committed their energy and resources to providing quality education to the more than 91,000 students across primary, secondary and university institutions in the territory.

“Our main purpose for this summit was to analyze where we are in the Adventist [educational] system in Inter-America, and what we should do as we study the statistics that our system provides us,” says Dr. Moises Velazquez, education director for the church in Inter-America.

“We have brought an educational reform… to evaluate and retain the good that we have and evaluate the challenges and opportunities facing us today,” he continued.

Among the main objectives of the summit, held at IAD headquarters in Miami Jan. 8-11, which included the presidents of the 13 universities and institutions of the IAD, as well as the presidents and educators from each of the 15 regions of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Inter-America, was the need to strengthen institutions to provide a better quality of Christian education to the fast growing church membership.

Statistics demonstrate that the number of Adventists attending the 1,010 primary, secondary and tertiary schools throughout the territory is decreasing. Only 30 percent of the more than 2.6 million church members attend an Adventist school in Inter-America. Another 28 percent attending the Adventist school system is non-Adventist. Thus it is a growing concern for educators and church leaders to boost enrollment by providing a new reform to the system, says Dr. Velazquez.

“The enrolment of our institutions is not increasing in the same proportion as our membership,” says Dr. Velazquez. “The [church] membership needs to better support Adventist education, while the membership grows rapidly but our [system] is not growing in the same proportion.”

It is from this growing need that leaders looked for different alternatives and approved several plans during the summit.

The first IAD Universities Consortium was established to serve as an organization that will work in an integrated manner with the universities, the IAD Office of Education and the Adventist community of the division territory.

“The Consortium will allow that the universities are growing and those which are developed unite efforts to provide the best possible service to our membership at the lowest cost possible,” says Dr. Velazquez. A constitution will be written and guidelines deemed necessary will be established to assure an effective and smooth operation of the consortium.

Eight members were elected and approved by summit attendees to head the IAD Universities Consortium.

There is a need to have better equipped teachers in order to offer quality education, says Dr. Velazquez.

“During visits to different church regions in the territory, we have discovered that some teachers in our system have only completed high school level, and many have one or two years of university studies, and for personal and/or financial reasons or other reasons have not been able to finish their teaching degrees,” explains Dr. Velazquez.

A vote was taken to ensure that teachers at all education levels must have completed a bachelor's degree by the year 2009. One way to provide that degree to the nearly 9,000 teachers in the IAD is the organization of the Inter-American Educational Center.

The Inter-American Educational Center (IEC) was approved by the IAD Committee to offer undergraduate degrees in conjunction with Griggs University until its own accreditation is reached.

The IEC will begin this summer with the enrollment of the first set of 300 teachers in Inter-America who teach at the elementary and secondary level. Next year another set of teachers will begin working on their degrees.

The center will be available for church members 20 years and older and will not compete with the existing Adventist universities.

“In order to promote quality education, we have begun with this plan to ensure that all of our teachers have their bachelor of arts degrees with the purpose of guaranteeing a good education,” says Dr. Velazquez.

In addition to trained teachers, pre-requisites for aspiring directors of education at the church union and local field level offices will include three years of classroom experience, two years as a school principal and a master’s degree in education.

Current directors of education serving the church must complete a master’s degree in the area of education, on or before 2009. Time and funding for the degree will be provided by the respective union/field territory.

New Bible textbooks for kindergarten through the sixth grade will be printed in Spanish later this year. A project which has been in place for more than three years, the textbooks will provide Adventist biblical teaching to more than 90,000 students across Inter-America’s elementary Adventist schools. The English and French versions of the new bible textbooks will be available next year.

Bible textbooks for grades 7-12 are expected to be completed by the year 2010.

Statistics on the educational system in the IAD show a significant number of non-Adventist students attending. Nearly half of the 91,426 students attending primary school in 2005 were non-Adventist, and more than half of the 49,103 students attending secondary schools are non-Adventist. To combat that, during the months of April to June, all institutions should be involved in educational evangelism.

Additional actions taken during the summit was a plan to open 100 new schools during the current five-year period, and to provide books and magazines to more than 650 primary, secondary and preparatory schools (grades K-12) in their school libraries, among others.

One such plan to provide better resources to students from the primary to university level is through a virtual library. Voted by educators and the IAD Committee, the IAD Virtual Library is scheduled to begin August of this year with thousands of resources stored in 15 data banks. Each data bank contains thousands of bibliographies, magazines, and other resources for a total of about 10 million items.

Accessible through schools with an online connection, students across the educational system will be able to have access to a library even if the school cannot afford to have a traditional library on school grounds, says Dr. Velazquez.

Defining and expanding the role of the Office of Education throughout the region was an important action taken by educators during the summit. For years, the education department has been primarily involved in promoting education and evaluating some of its thousands of schools, says Dr. Velazquez. But because of the increasing need to improve the educational system, a new structure for the office of education was voted.

The Office of Education will have administrative and supervisory functions.

“The Director of Education will be the director of the administrative office at the union and local field level,” the action states. “At the local field level the office must have a technical evaluator such as a school principle, an accountant exclusively for the schools, a legal counselor, a secretary.”

This office will better cater to the needs of each school in its territory so that education at all levels can be improved in the system, says Velazquez.

According to Dr. Velazquez, one of the greatest challenges to changing the course of education in Inter-America is the attitude toward change.

“What attitude are we going to take, an attitude of change or an attitude of immobilization?” he asked summit attendees.

Velazquez emphasized that the traditional models must be broken, and that working together is the only way to start the change.

“We have a different membership than from 30 years ago. The level of schooling that parents of today have is much higher than decades ago,” noted Velazquez. ” We have to continue preparing to teach the child of today, the kind of child that knows the computer more than we do…that from very young is in this cybernetic world.”

“The bottom line,” says Dr. Velazquez, who holds a doctorate degree in mathematics, “This is a mathematical equation. Better quality [of education] equals more students, and with more students, better retention, because everyone wants to be in a school that not only takes care of its students but teaches.”

The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Inter-America owns and operates 680 primary schools, 317 secondary schools and 13 universities throughout its 15 regions.

For more information on the IAD Office of Education and its programs, visit www.interamerica.org.