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 Vallarta Living | April 2007 
US Retiree's Bilingual School Wins Hearts in Vallarta
 Marla Dickerson - LATimes
| | Olympic hopeful tries the school's new Olympic Pool as hundreds of students and parents cheer her on. |
Puerto Vallarta — A few years after retiring to this Pacific resort city, David Bender was bored with golf. His new hobby, the American decided, would be tackling Mexico's income inequality. He would do it by teaching English to Mexican children.
Never mind that Mexico didn't ask for his help. Or that the former advertising executive knew nothing about running a school. Bender saw working families hungry for affordable English-language instruction and a shot at upward mobility for their kids.
Credit a seasoned adman for knowing his market. Less than five years since its founding, Colegio Mexico-Americano has become the largest school in Puerto Vallarta. The nonprofit's tuition is 70% cheaper than that of the city's priciest bilingual academy. Enrollment has grown to 1,135 students, with dozens on the waiting list.
Friends who thought Bender had gone off the deep end were right in one respect; the private institution boasts Puerto Vallarta's only Olympic-size swimming pool.
Not bad for a project that began in August 2002 with a few preschoolers learning their ABCs. It is vindication for Bender, a preacher's son who never lost faith when the current campus was a weed-choked vacant lot with no funding and plenty of doubters. "We saw a tremendous need," said the former Chicagoan, 71. "We are trying to build a middle class in Mexico."
Some might chafe at the notion of an American who speaks little Spanish presuming to remake Mexican society. But the school's enthusiastic reception here speaks of parents' desire for their kids to learn English in a town where most of the good jobs require it. It's also a testament to how badly government educators are failing many of Mexico's youths.
There are few developing nations with more to gain by teaching its citizens English. About 85% of Mexico's exports go to the U.S. Americans and Canadians comprise the majority of its international visitors. More than 400,000 Mexicans migrate illegally to the U.S. each year in search of work. The money these expatriates send home — $23 billion last year alone — is a pillar of Mexico's economy.
But while Latin nations such as Costa Rica and Chile have seized on English fluency as a key to their global competitiveness, Mexico has done little to prepare its youngsters. The state requires just three hours a week of English instruction for three years during Mexico's equivalent of junior high school, often by teachers who don't speak the language well.
"Pencil. Window. Door. It was useless," said Jose de Jesus Alcantar Delgado, a Puerto Vallarta workman recalling his rudimentary lessons. Lack of fluency has kept him from higher-paying employment in the city's air-conditioned resorts.
Experts blame scarce resources, an inflexible teachers union and widespread resentment of U.S. hegemony. Puerto Vallarta mom Kenia Salazar Torres isn't buying it. English is standard in elite academies where the children of Mexico's wealthy matriculate. Salazar wants the same chance for her three boys.
Her oldest son, Jose Rodolfo, 9, has a partial scholarship to Colegio Mexico-Americano . Salazar earns the rest by rising daily before dawn to prepare refried beans to peddle to local markets. Her husband, Arturo, is a ticket seller at the bus station. He's trying to land a better job to earn tuition money for their twin 5-year-old sons.
Jose Rodolfo helps out by collecting cans to earn recycling money. Fidgeting in a chair in the family's tidy home on a recent afternoon, he was too shy to practice his English with an American visitor. But the serious, handsome child knows what's at stake. "That's how you get a good job," he said softly in Spanish.
Such stories keep the balding, bespectacled Bender focused on what has become an all-consuming second career. Raised in Pittsburgh, the grandson of a penniless German immigrant farmer and the son of an evangelical minister, Bender parlayed a magazine writing contest into a college scholarship.
He found his calling in advertising, eventually starting his own agency, Chicago-based Bender, Browning, Dolby & Sanderson. Bender prospered. He and his wife, Gloria, moved into a stylish oceanfront home north of Puerto Vallarta in 2000. It was time to slow down, enjoy the good life.
But the kinetic Bender found he could only golf so many rounds. The chasm between Mexico's haves and have-nots gnawed at him. So did the corruption that stifles so much entrepreneurial activity here. Education, he reasoned, was the remedy.
He helped raise scholarships to keep low-income children in class with money for uniforms, supplies and other extras not covered by the government. Then he got a good look at the public schools. There he saw teeming classrooms, crumbling facilities, poorly trained teachers and pitifully low expectations for students. "I thought, 'Oh, my God, what are we doing to these kids that we're supposed to be helping?' " he said.
Conversations with the mostly Mexican congregation of his local church, the New Dawn Christian Center, led to the idea of launching a secular, nonprofit, bilingual school that working-class families could afford. The facility would give kids English skills to thrive in a global economy. It would stress character development to mold a new generation of leaders.
Bender spearheaded a fundraising effort, hitting up friends in the U.S. for seed money to clear an old junkyard and build three classrooms on rented land. Colegio Mexico-Americano opened its doors with 35 preschoolers and the goal of adding a grade every year all the way through high school.
But as the school expanded, Bender spotted a trend that disturbed him. Slots were being taken by the children of well-heeled parents who knew a bargain when they saw one. Annual tuition and fees are $2,645 for a grade-school student. That's 40% below the city average for comparable private schools and less than one-third the annual cost for the American School, the city's priciest academy.
"I'm looking at all these fancy cars pulling up and I'm thinking we're not here to perpetuate the society that Mexico already has," Bender said. "I don't want to be a revolutionary. I just want to give ordinary Mexican families the chance to get on the bottom rung so they can climb up themselves."
Bender said he and school administrators dismissed reviewing a family's financial standing for admission criterion as unworkable. The solution, they agreed, was a bigger campus to take all comers.
But no bank in either Mexico or the United States would lend the pipsqueak nonprofit a peso, much less the millions needed for land acquisition and construction. With deadlines looming, teachers bailing and gossip swirling that Colegio Mexico-Americano's grand ambitions were doomed, the school appealed to those with the most at stake: parents.
Some risked everything they had. Maria Elena Covarrubias Ibarra was among those to pledge their homes as security to a landowner who agreed to sell the school 5 1/2 acres on installment. Forced to quit school at age 16, Covarrubias said she would rather leave her grandkids an education than a house.
Others raided their savings accounts and mattresses, extending unsecured loans on little more than a handshake. Tradespeople swapped building materials to get their kids a seat in class. Laborers such as Alcantar proved crucial as well. Spurred by the promise of full-time maintenance jobs at Colegio Mexico-Americano and discounted tuition for their kids, he and other members of the construction crew toiled 18-hour days and slept on the job site for weeks to deliver the new school on time for the August 2005 opening. "It was worth it," said Alcantar, who has two daughters enrolled. "I hear my girls speaking [English] and I feel so proud."
Colegio Mexico-Americano is now on pace to reach its capacity enrollment of 1,300 students this fall after the final classrooms are constructed. Daily instruction is split almost evenly between Spanish and English. The school counts eight Americans among its teaching staff of 84. U.S. donors have provided loans, scholarships and gifts, including the Olympic-size swimming pool that is one of the school's most successful recruiting tools.
Yet the atmosphere is more Mexico than Americano . Students dressed in uniforms of white polo shirts and blue pants or skirts honor Mexican heroes at the weekly flag ceremony. The school song exhorts them to be "the new generation that Mexico needs today, people with integrity made to govern."
It's a mandate that students such as Samantha Gutierrez Vasquez appear to be taking seriously. "A senator or president of Mexico needs to speak English," said the 13-year-old between classes.
It's the kind of comment that Bender cites as proof that the school is making a difference, despite its growing pains. Rapid expansion has led to discipline problems and a student body with widely divergent levels of achievement, according to staff.
Bender is pulling double duty as the head of the board of trustees and chief financial officer. He often works 80 hours a week. The school is $2.5 million in debt. Still, strolling the campus recently dressed in khakis and a baseball cap, smiling and chatting with students and staff, Bender looked like a guy having the time of his life.
Old friends say his tenacity is characteristic of the hard-charging entrepreneur they knew from Chicago. So is the importance of faith and good works. Still, longtime pals such as Jim Hogan can't fathom why Bender would want to louse up a comfortable retirement with such a demanding do-gooder project.
"I have questioned him repeatedly: 'Why are you doing this? You are not a young man to be taking on all this pressure,' " said Hogan, 68. "But it's like David has been reborn. He has a whole new purpose for his life."
Indeed, Bender is now looking to replicate the school in other parts of Mexico, leaving friends wondering what the septuagenarian has in mind for a succession plan. The answer may be wandering the halls of Colegio Mexico-Americano in a white polo shirt and sneakers.
"These kids are going to change Mexico," Bender said. "Wait and see."
marla.dickerson@latimes.com |
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