A third-grade teacher from Indian Creek Intermediate School is heading to Haiti for eight months, with a goal of starting a science, technology, engineering and math program at a school there.
Jaime Rainwater will embark on her journey on Oct. 1 and will return to Indiana in June. She will go with her husband and her son, now eight years old. The groundwork for going to the village of Neply, about 23 miles west of the capital of Port-Au-Prince, started almost a decade ago.
“I started going to Haiti in 2011,” Rainwater said. “My husband and I took a two-week mission trip there and I fell in love with the country. I met my son who we ended up adopting two years later there. When we went home we wanted him to remember his culture, where he came from and we wanted to give back. We would go for the entire month of June for him to experience his culture.”
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Those one-month visits came in 2016, 2017 and 2018. While there, Rainwater realized that teachers at the myLIFEspeaks school in Neply didn’t have the training or resources necessary to teach children at the same level she did at Indian Creek. Using the skills she’d developed through her 17 years of teaching experience, she led professional development efforts during those three visits. The school asked her to come back for a longer period of time, not only to continue her professional development efforts, but to lead efforts in science, technology, engineering and math, commonly known as STEM.
Rainwater has demonstrated she’s the right person for the trip through her excellence in teaching, said Andrea Perry, principal of Indian Creek Intermediate School.
“She’s a remarkable educator. We’re very excited. Her vision for learning knows no bounds,” Perry said.
“She has a real knack for building relationships with all of her students.”
The STEM program will involve learning how to solve real-life issues such as how to ensure people have access to clean drinking water. Biweekly video conferences between the myLIFEspeaks school and Indian Creek Intermediate School will enable students in Trafalgar to benefit from Rainwater’s efforts about 1,650 miles away as they brainstorm solutions to those same problems, Rainwater said.
“We’ll connect with the STEM program here,” Rainwater said. “We’ll make videos. There’s a major water source, the creek, and people wash their clothes and animals drink from the creek. If the wells dry up how could you filter the water to drink it?”
Jessi Ellis, the STEM teacher for students in third through fifth grade at the intermediate school, will collect a list of ideas the students brainstorm. The class will present its top two to three ideas to Rainwater, who will then get students in Haiti to test it. Using these strategies will change the way teachers approach learning at the Haitian school, Rainwater said.
“Hands-on learning is very rare in Haiti,” Rainwater said. “There’s a lot of kids in overcrowded classrooms. It’s basically memorization; teachers use a lecture style.”
By using a more hands-on and interactive approach, Rainwater hopes to bolster student’s interest in learning and success later in life. Rainwater will also develop a curriculum for the school and lead professional development efforts when she’s not teaching the semiweekly STEM class.
“We have great teaching programs and access to resources, they don’t,” Rainwater said. “They just have what they’ve been taught. The procedures are very old-fashioned. There’s so much research in education and how kids learn and practices here. They don’t have access to that. That’s their ticket out.”
A resident of Haiti will be hired as a translator for Rainwater’s class. That translator will get paid the equivalent of $15 twice a week for each STEM class, which is a livable wage in Haiti. Coupled with a fundraiser at the intermediate school this week, the NHJ Foundation, which supports Indian Creek schools, donated $500 to the cause. Along with the translator’s salary, the money will also go towards classroom materials for the Haitian students, such as Legos, glue, scissors and pipe-cleaners, Rainwater said.
“I’m excited about so much,” Rainwater said. “I’m really excited about connecting these two worlds. Indian Creek and Haiti are so important to me. They mean so much. They’re my two favorite places and I get to connect them together.”
Rainwater will return to her Indian Creek third grade classroom for the 2020-21 school year, she said.
