Early Stimulation Classrooms (SETs) and Non-accredited Pre-school Programs (PRONEIs) exist in communities or neighborhoods in Peru where formal pre-school is not available due to the lack of student population or municipal/ state budget.
SETs work with children 0-3 years old and PRONOEIs with children 3-5 years old. SET and PRONOEI teachers, known as “Promoters”, are not actually trained teachers. Anyone who has graduated from secondary school and is willing to work full time for only 332.00 nuevos soles (less than half the national minimum wage) is eligible to be a promoter.
Furthermore, because SETs and PRONOEIs are non-accredited, but are “coordinated” by the Ministry of Education, they fall into a grey area of responsibility between the local branch of the Ministry of Education and the local government. Therefore, they are generally forgotten and severely underfunded; caught between two bureaucracies with little incentive to spend on non-accredited early education.
In August of 2014, the Alma Foundation will fund a one-week training course, hosted by the Centro Lantinoamericano de Ayuda Social (CLAS), for 211 promoters and their respective coordinators covering 61 SETs and 149 PRONOEIs, or 3,993 children 0-5 years old, in Cajamarca.
Themes to be covered include classroom management, lesson plan building, state-mandated curriculum guidelines, early childhood stimulation, early childhood health and nutrition, educational art and creativity, etc.
This is the only pedagogic training available to the promoters of its kind, in which both promoters and their respective coordinators attend the workshops together in order to receive profession specific training on a broad range to relevant topics.
After the six day course, the Alma Foundation will monitor and evaluate the implementation of the covered topics and techniques in the classrooms of the promoters by one-on-one visits and classroom observation.
