Our school year starts in February and ends around December 15. There is a one-week break for Eastern and a two-week break in July. The Public Education System in Costa Rica is good. I'm a proof of it. I never had the chance to go to any private school or university, and still, I achieved a Master’s degree in translation. Some private schools are better than the public system schools because they have a larger budget that allows them to have more resources and more extensive curricula. Public schools in rural areas have very little resources and little control by Costa Rica’s Education Department. Therefore, some of them are not as good as the schools from more populated areas, closer to the government's supervision, like the Central Valley (San Jose, Heredia, Alajuela, and Cartago's city and suburbs).

I think San Isidro has good public schools and high schools. I also know that many of the foreigners in the area of Dominical/Uvita/Ballena are working to have a branch of a private school and high school from San Isidro called Escuela del Valle (www.escoldelvalle.com) in the area of Uvita. In the present, they usually send their children to one of the public schools in Cortes (an administrative-center town about 35 km away from Uvita).

Francine Ocampo R.