Location: The Caraballo Education Center, Batey Caraballo, Dominican Republic Number of children participating: 50 DREAM Staff: 1 DREAM volunteer, 1 Community Worker
Program Summary
After continued success with at-risk youth programs like the Guzman Ariza DREAM Summer School & Camp, the DREAM Project officially launched the Young Stars Program in the fall of 2008, enrolling over 80 local youth. The Young Stars (Estrellas Jóvenes) program operates within two of our sites, the DREAM Education Center and the DREAM Caraballo Education Center in Batey Caraballo. These 12-week extracurricular programs are for at-risk adolescents between the ages of 10 and 18 and run two times during the academic year. A continuation of the foundation laid in summer camp, the Young Stars program in the DREAM Center in Cabarete offers leadership and literacy classes over four hours a day for four days a week. Literacy courses, a major focus of the program, center on reading, writing, math, computers and library skills. Leadership courses offer employable leadership skills through courses on journalism, young men’s and women’s issues, computers, ESL, and internships, where students are placed in local businesses to obtain experience and possible future employment. DREAM continues to track our students’ academic growth and strength through literacy and mathematics assessment systems appropriate for our youth.
Through the DREAM At-Risk Youth Program, students have the opportunity to improve their academic performance and engage in programs that confront the modern challenges of Dominican youth, while learning essential life skills such as teamwork, leadership, communication, decision-making skills, and the importance of community service. Based on its initial success, DREAM launched a mini Young Stars program at the Caraballo Education Center for the 2009-2010 school year. Highlights of the Caraballo program include an active youth group, HIV/AIDS awareness classes provided by Fútbol Para La Vida, Community Library, and academic tutoring.
Batey Caraballo
In the Dominican Republic, the word "batey" (bah - tay) denotes the living quarters or "neighborhood" of resident cane cutters on land belonging to a large sugar company. Batey Caraballo lies among the sugar cane fields of Montellano in the province of Puerto Plata. The town of Caraballo is made up of Dominican, Haitian Dominican and Haitian residents living in varying conditions of poverty on low-lying, overcrowded land that is prone to flooding. The town is isolated geographically from the surrounding communities by extensive cane fields. The physical isolation in combination with cultural barriers have further strengthened the racial conflicts between the Dominican community and Haitian Dominicans in the area. The first step to eliminating these conditions of extreme poverty and racial divide is to bring the community together through its most critical need: quality education for its children. In a community where many children simply do not attend school, the Mini-Young Stars Program will introduce disadvantaged children to quality after-school programming that will encourage them to continue on to high school, pursue higher education, and obtain the valuable skills needed to secure employment after graduation.
