In order to please students’ parents and other local interested parties, and in order to show their superiors at the regional Ministry offices that they were abiding by the reforms, these directors also needed to maintain and expand the physical structure of their schools. Both schools in the urban setting of San Lorenzo and the rural communities in the municipality of Nacaome competed for funding among other schools in Valle for basic projects such as fixing roofs to prevent flooding, fixing doors and windows to prevent theft, and constructing new classrooms to accommodate their growing student population.
Despite the requirement of the education reforms to solicit funding from municipal governments, teachers were conscious that any commitments obtained from
municipal authorities could well go unfulfilled, and were therefore cautious about making promises to parents and community members. At Carías Andino, municipal authorities indeed backed down from initial commitments made in conversation63 with the directors to help fund the reconstruction of two classrooms. The school directors and teachers’ council were afraid that such actions would upset not only their superiors at the regional Ministry of Education offices, but also the Sociedad de Padres de Familia at their school. As a result they sought funding from the daughter of a multi-millionaire cantaloupe melon exporter who ran a foundation to support local development initiatives. Despite the initial positive interactions with this potential donor, she declined an invitation to visit the school and the directors thus lost the chance to ask her formally to help fund their project.
These interactions with the melon company’s foundation took place over several months and were therefore time-consuming for the directors and the rest of the Carías Andino teachers. During this time they held numerous meetings with the Sociedad de Padres de Familia, explaining their initiatives and progress with soliciting the funds. At one point the entire student body and teachers were preparing an elaborate welcome party with food, dancing, and games for this potential funder, all of which was cancelled when she declined to come.
Once both the municipal government and the daughter of this melon exporter failed to provide funding, the third option for these teachers was a sugar cane export company that ran a similar foundation for community development projects in the regions where they operate. The sugar-cane company foundation agreed to support half of the
63 We should not misinterpret such oral agreements to fund school projects as always untrue or invalid. They are often
the real ways through which such funding actually reaches the schools – based on conversations with politicians over beer (a very gendered activity), at soccer matches, or even over the phone (as we will see in Chapter 5).
budget for the project, but this was not achieved without conflict. The company has its own reasons for donating this money to the school: any such donations function as tax write-offs, reducing the taxable revenue of the company. Conflicts arose when the company needed the directors to sign corresponding paperwork confirming that they were receiving the amount claimed. After review of the documents detailing the budget for the construction project, Mercedes initially refused to sign them. According to her analysis, the company would be claiming a higher amount donated than they were actually paying toward the school project.
In the context of this dispute Carías Andino teachers also voiced their broader disagreement with the very idea that a sugar cane company was needed to fund their school projects. Honduran schoolteachers’ struggles against these reforms have included the demand that the state pay for such necessities. They want the post-coup government to see education as a social investment, not an expense to be minimized in nation-wide budgetary planning (a topic I examine in Chapter 7, by returning to this example to analyze a different set of processes after the construction project was complete). Teachers did recognize however that the leaner, meaner, post-coup neoliberal state is not going to pay to fix the holes in their roof anytime soon. They needed to act with what resources were available to them, to meet urgent needs at the school. Even despite the misleading tax claims, Profe Mercedes and other teachers at this rural school set aside aspects of their own political opinions on how education ought to be funded, in order to work through the challenges they were facing in their everyday work, as they navigated through the beginnings of these reforms.
As a strategy to pay for the other half of the project, these school administrators asked the Sociedad de Padres de Familia not to donate money themselves, but rather to organize a Bingo fundraising event.64 Teachers instructed the parents and students about
how to approach selling the Bingo tickets, and how to properly ask businesses and numerous individuals in the region to donate prize items, drafting a formal letter on their behalf (see Appendix H). The teachers, parents and students spent their time asking everyone possible for a donation, even me. And the event managed to gather the remaining funds.