School Days

The major reason Bucher and I felt able to stay in Belize was that excellent schools were available. By U.S. standards, Belize schools were limited in their programs, but Bucher and I never stopped crediting St. Catherine’s and St. John’s with giving our two the academic foundation they needed to build successful lives.

If later the children told us that much of their early learning had been by the discredited “rote” method, we still knew that they had learned forever basic arithmetic, spelling, and grammar. If they did not have access to the wide variety of subjects available in U.S. schools, still they received firm grounding in core courses.

Both children were valedictorians of their high school classes. They entered U.S. universities academically level with, or ahead of, their U.S. contemporaries.