by Rod Hughes

Classes are set to open next Monday but Minister of Education Leonardo Garnier is still struggling with messes left him by his predecessors including a serious shortfall of classrooms, equipment and a chronic bureaucratic snarl in payment of salaries.

The daily newspaper La Nacion revealed late last year that salary and personnel records are so antiquated that checks were still being issued to teachers who had moved on or passed on years ago. Now that same paper spotlights the strange situation where a teacher incapacitated by illness or injury may earn more than one working hard in the classroom.

But more urgent even than this expensive injustice is the shortfall of 13,000 students’ desks and 28,826 classrooms due to population growth. (Since the country’s birth rate has fallen to ,9 per mother, much of this growth must be laid to the influx of foreigners, principally Nicaraguans, many illegal immigrants.)

Garnier noted that the classroom shortfall can be remedied only gradually and construction includes not only additions to existing primary and secondary schools but whole new neighborhood schools. Only 34 billion colones is budgeted this year for this task. (The colon has been hovering at about 500 per dollar.)

So far, 45,500 teachers have been appointed with only some 2,811 to be named, most of the latter parttime with only 20 class hours per week. The teachers will be working in front of an estimated 962,500 pupils in this country which was a proud pioneer of universal education in Latin America. Unfortunately, the system has fallen woefully far behind in this efficient, computerized age.

Bureaucratic glitches do not help. A teacher who was absent because of illness or injury in February of 2006 inexplicably receives 13% higher salary than one who was not. Where the average monthly wage was 477,000 colones in 2006, a teacher who was incapacitated that month gets 550,000. But in any other month of that year, the absent teacher would receive 133,600 colones, four times less. Go figure.