Joe Albers '02 increases access to education in El Salvador with new school
Three years ago, Joe Albers ’02 remembers waking up at 5:30 in the morning, knowing what he wanted to do for the first time in a long time. He needed to start a school in El Salvador.
About four months earlier, Albers had quit his job as the principal of Cristo Rey San Jose. In many ways, Cristo Rey had been a dream job, and leaving was an extremely difficult decision that had pulled up roots deep within him.
Albers was at Cristo Rey San Jose from the start. Serving as the school’s first principal, he went from accepting a job with no students to opening a year later with 130. After four years, San Jose Cristo Rey flourished, with more than 500 students and 5 classes of students who graduated.
Like so many other teachers and administrators, Albers was affected by the challenges of online teaching during the pandemic. Though proud of what he built at Cristo Rey, he decided to step back and reevaluate his professional future to spend more time with his family.
What would come next wasn’t clear, at least not at first. When Albers woke up before sunrise that morning two years ago, he remembered his college days when his career path started. Specifically, a service trip to El Salvador.
When Albers attended 海角视频 in the early 2000s, he was the Director of SCAAP and active in Campus Ministry. When researching immersion trips, he recalled the warning of the student who recruited him to go on one.
“If you’re looking to do service, don‘t come here,” he said. “If you’re looking to make relationships and be in a community, come.”
Instead of uncertainty or fear, Albers found inspiration in the student’s challenge.
On the immersion trip to El Salvador, Albers lived on a farm with a family in Guarjila, El Salvador. He woke up early to clean cornfield weeds. In the afternoons, he accompanied a youth group.
The trip inspired him to come back in the following years, returning to teach English in Guarjila after graduating.
“I found the other half of me [in El Salvador],” Albers says. “It just made me feel like I felt whole.”
So, for his next chapter, Albers decided to revisit the half of himself he’d found in college. Much like he did for Cristo Rey, Albers wanted to continue aiding low-income communities in rural areas of El Salvador, addressing the issues of migration to the U.S., mainly education and economic opportunities.
With the help of Albers’ longtime friend, Luis López Alfaro, they started to plan how to make this school a reality, with the same goal in mind: accessibility of education.
Giving Back to the Community
Moving to El Salvador wasn’t in the picture for Albers. His family is in San Jose, and he didn’t want to uproot the lives they’d built. Fortunately, his connections from El Salvador allowed him to pursue building the school remotely as a possibility.
Rural areas of El Salvador, like those in Chalatenango, face educational disparities due to inaccessibility and low quality of education due to poverty. In 2023, 21.5% of Salvadorans between the ages of 15 to 24 were neither in school nor employed.
“I’d always kind of talked about starting a school over there,” says Albers. “So one day I just kind of called my friend Luis, who I’d become friends with years ago, and said, you know, now is the time, let‘s do it. And he said, ‘Okay’.”
Once they started the project in August 20212, López Alfaro and Albers were in constant communication to make the school happen. Albers worked on promotion and fundraising in the U.S., while López Alfaro focused on the hands-on work down at the school.
In El Salvador, the school year typically starts in January. To open in time, Albers and his team needed to find a location, get approval from the government to open the school, hire teachers, and then finally enroll students. They could wait until the following year, but they didn’t want to lose a year.
“We said, let‘s give it a try,” said Albers.
With their outreach efforts and collaboration with a local diocese, they managed to enroll a total of 40 students, opening right on time to welcome these students to a new bilingual elementary school named Rutilio Grande School. The school has now grown to 90 students serving four grade levels.
Albers remembers the first day that the school was able to open in vivid detail.
“I remember the first kid who walked in and saw the excitement on their faces because they had their school,” says Albers. We gathered for a little prayer, and I remember thinking how beautiful it was to see the kids all come together. This is their school, and they were just excited to be part of it.”
With the success of the school, Albers saw an opportunity to impact the greater community, specifically through job training for the parents of the children and other adults in the community. Within the first year, Albers also opened a work training program for adults, the Grande Workforce Initiative, teaching adults how to complete entry-level tech jobs and training over 70 adults since 2022. In March of 2023, they launched a tech company doing data labeling for the field of artificial intelligence which now employs over 25 people.
“My initial concept was once the kids got to high school, that kind of had a Cristo Rey like model, except the students would work remotely for companies in the United States,” says Albers. “In El Salvador, there are a lot of people who don‘t have jobs. There are jobs in tech. Why don‘t we train adults, too? I thought that was a really good idea. And so that‘s how we started the second part of Grand Center, which is an adult workforce training program.”
Albers decided to name the joint venture the Grande Center for Education and Economic Opportunity (GCEEO). GCEEO plans on expanding Rutilio Grande School to a fully functioning K-12 campus, doubling as an adult training center at night.
“The goal of GCEEO is to serve the community deeply and well to ensure people have a long-term way to sustain their future,” adds Albers.
