Before the remodeling began, the only drawback Katherine remembers at the Jorge Lardé Educational Complex was the leaking roof. Katherine is a 17-year-old who has just finished her second year of high school in the Las Higueras canton of Izalco, Sonsonate. “We felt fine in the grades. The only thing missing from the school was a new roof. Nothing else. The school was fine. I don't know why they did that,” said Katherine.
The remodeling began in November 2023. A month and a half later, the company subcontracted by the Ministry of Education abandoned the site without explaining the reasons, leaving students and teachers without a place to continue the school year. When the school could no longer be used, the teachers instructed the students that they would receive classes virtually for a while. But not all had stable electricity, access to the internet, or even a computer.
In mid-April 2024, a group of parents got together to invest $22.75 per student and raise the budget to improvise a tent that would soon become the classroom for high school sophomores. Ivania, one of the mothers who contributed money, said that the attempts to restore the work areas were not the initiative of the teachers or the government. “At first, the children had nowhere to be. It was up to them to see where they could find help so that they could study. Afterwards, each grade level met and all the parents decided to raise a little money to do something temporary for them.”
Katherine is one of more than 500 students receiving classes in tents, in private homes, and the facilities of an Adventist Church since the end of 2023. Two students, three parents and two other community members spoke to El Faro during a visit on February 21.
Attending classes inside that tent was unfeasible. “Being there all day was horrible. I wanted to escape from the heat and dust. And when it rained, our shoes got wet. We had to share a single desk between two or three people to be able to write, because there weren't enough desks either,” Katherine complained.
Joaquín, a middle-school student, says that many of his classmates who took classes in the tents suffered from respiratory illnesses. “All the dust from outside came in and then you got sick. And, since they didn’t have a blackboard, the teachers just explained things like that.” Joaquín and Katherine agree that they and the parents installed three toilets that were donated from another school, which they were unable to identify. “At first, there was only one toilet and hardly any water. Later, they built others, but they were very dirty because they were old toilets,” he said, adding, “I always came out of there sick, because of all the dust.”
Alexander and Arelí are farmers and parents of two children of pre-kindergarten age. Their children attend classes from 10 a.m. to 12 noon, as part of the group of the youngest children, under three years old. Alexander said that before the dismantling of the school facilities, the head teacher had told them that the company in charge would build a second floor. Since the work was abandoned, they feared for their children’s health.
“Because of the dust there, the little ones get sick. They have been kept in a very small place with a leaking roof,” Alexander said. “The first year, I took them to the courtyard of a house for the day, and last year they had activities in a shed. They had nothing covering it and it was half concreted over,” Arelí described. Both complained that there were no toilets. “When they want to pee, they look for little places like that for them to go, like behind a tree,” Arelí added.
The school tents went viral on the internet during the second week of February, first on social networks and then in the press, following a video by Noticiero Teledos on February 17th, which had 714,000 views.
The tents are no longer there. Relatives of the school’s pupils told El Faro that on February 20 vehicles with the Ministry of Education logo and heavy machinery arrived. While the construction is ongoing, the students will once again have to attend classes in the Adventist Church or in other private homes provided by the neighborhood.
The government, said Ivania, has not yet given them any more information. “Yesterday (February 20) we had a parents’ meeting and they said that the (construction) company had kind of let them down, but now they are working. They started yesterday. They haven’t said how long it will take, but most parents say they have come because of some videos on social media. Supposedly, there was a parent from this school who uploaded videos of how the children were at the beginning. Because it had been a long time and they hadn’t come around here.”
“We don’t know who made that complaint on the internet about the state of the school, but today let’s see if they fix it,” said Cecilia, clapping her hands to shape the roll of dough to form a tortilla. “Just yesterday, February 20, they started to destroy the huts, because in the morning they were still there and in the afternoon they started to destroy them because they started to work already. At midday the machine passed by there,” said Estela, who was also making tortillas. Both tortilla makers are grandmothers of students who have suffered the abandonment of the Ministry of Education.
From outside the school grounds, El Faro could see vehicles with Ministry of Education emblems and construction machinery, as well as dozens of workers carrying tools.
Promises of renovation
The case of Las Higueras is extreme, but not an isolated one. Since President Nayib Bukele promised in 2022 to renovate 5,000 schools under the My New School program, he has only made 8 percent progress, according to a report from the Salvadoran State sent to the U.N. Human Rights Council in October 2024. Less than 2 percent of the infrastructure budget has been spent per year since Bukele launched the program in September 2022.
7.6 kilometers from Las Higueras, in the village of North Tapalshucut, there is another school that has had a collapsed roof and been abandoned since 2023. The structure is overgrown with weeds and the walls are cracked. The school was also set to be refurbished in February of that year, but the work was abandoned by the Ministry of Education subcontractor three weeks after it began. No work crews have arrived to resume the remodeling.
A teacher who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals told El Faro that pre-schoolers are receiving classes in a rented house and that the upper-grade students are divided between another brick house and a multifunctional UNICEF tent in the empty courtyard of that house.
Alonso Martínez, a member of the community’s board of directors, told El Faro that the dismantling of the school by the Ministry of Education had been “a disgrace”: “For me it’s a shame to see how they have that school, because quite a few children from here have had to go to schools in the town or city. Here, winter time is a disaster. The poor kids, maybe with their shoes polished, are wading through the mud.”
On February 21, El Faro gained access to the facilities where the students and teachers meet. To get to the site, there is no need to open a gate, just follow an uneven dirt road and pass through a hole that interrupts the row of rudimentary timber acting as a fence.
According to the teacher, when the school closed for construction, the director, under orders from the Ministry of Education, looked for houses and plots of land available to rent while the work was being completed. This, she said, has led to school dropouts, because the students do not feel comfortable receiving their classes in those conditions. “Before there were 125 students and today there are only 80,” she said.
Low enrollment
In El Salvador, some 50,000 students have not enrolled this year, according to union representatives. In a television interview, the secretary-general of the public-school teachers’ union SIMEDUCO, Francisco Zelada, estimated that 25,000 students did not enroll in public schools this year. The situation is no different in private education. Javier Hernández, president of the Association of Private Schools of El Salvador, also estimated that 25,000 students did not enroll in 2025.
During its visit to Tapalshucut, El Faro witnessed how a white van with private license plates parked in front of the abandoned school. Three people got out of the van: a man and two women; one of them introduced herself as the municipal delegate of the Izalco canton.
The man, who was standing two meters away from one of the El Faro journalists, answered the phone, which was on loud. The journalist managed to hear the conversation: “Hello, mister engineer, I am a representative of MUSSAL, an organization that supports His Excellency, President Nayib Bukele. We are verifying the conditions of the school, but hold on, I see someone here recording a video,” he said while looking at one of the journalists. On the other end of the line, the engineer suggested that he record the second journalist with his phone: “Record everything you do, but you keep quiet,” he said. The conversation was interrupted by a teacher on her way out.
The man and one of the women introduced themselves as representatives of the Salvadoran Social Unity Movement (MUSSAL), and assured the teacher that they had come to check the conditions of the school, after coordinating with Ibrajim Bukele, brother of the president, after the parents of the Las Higueras district had denounced the conditions in which their children had been receiving classes under tents for two years.
On Facebook and X, MUSSAL bills itself as “a nationwide support movement for the best president in history, Nayib Bukele.” One of its pinned posts shows its president, Amílcar Monge, and other members of the organization, meeting with Ibrajim Bukele, with the caption: “In favor of the communities and cantons of our country”. In others, they publicize campaigns about the visits that its members make to rural communities. They also share Bukele propaganda.
El Faro contacted MUSSAL via WhatsApp to find out about its links with the government and why it carries out operations that the Ministry should be doing. No one replied.
Also in Izalco, in East Sonsonate, 5.4 kilometers from Las Higueras, the El Bambú Community School was also recently closed by the Ministry of Education. In January of this year, parents were informed that the closure was due to low enrollment, community leader Martha Pérez told El Faro. According to a report in newspaper La Prensa Gráfica, last year this school had 35 students from kindergarten to sixth grade.
El Bambú closed despite the fact that in 2023 the German Embassy in El Salvador made a donation of $24,197 for the construction of three new classrooms, a kitchen, a warehouse, a perimeter fence, a sink, and the remodeling of the roof, as confirmed to El Faro by the Embassy’s communications office. When these buildings were inaugurated, a deputy for Nuevas Ideas, José Raúl Chamagua, published photos of the school and of his participation in the inauguration ceremonies: “I had the privilege of sharing this joy with the community, before coming to the plenary to legislate for and on behalf of all Salvadorans,” he wrote. El Faro contacted Chamagua to find out his position on the closure, but he did not respond.
The situation of the schools and the drop in student numbers occur in a year in which the government cut $30 million from the education budget. This is the lowest percentage in relation to GDP since 2020, as revealed in an article in La Prensa Gráfica. Idalia Zúniga, a union leader interviewed by El Faro last year, warned: “In El Salvador, the public school system is being dismantled.” These budget cuts occur as the government tries to comply with public spending cuts per its agreement with the International Monetary Fund for a $1.4 billion-dollar loan.
