Caring for Cambodia

It is January 2003. A 9-year-old Cambodian girl tugs on Jamie Amelio’s shirt while she’s touring the famous temples of Angkor Wat and asks for a dollar to go to school.  Later, after seeing the school’s deplorable conditions and learning about the Cambodian genocide that had targeted the educated, Jamie vows to help the country’s children.

Within months, she and her husband, Lehigh alum Bill Amelio ’79, ’08H form the non-governmental  organization Caring for Cambodia (CFC). They first raise money to buy uniforms and backpacks for a school in the Siem Reap province, then open CFC’s first school, the Spean Chreav Amelio Primary School. Over the next 13 years, CFC grows, operating 21 schools, all in Siem Riep, that support more than 6,600 Cambodian children and provide health and dental screenings, early education and other programs. 

It’s a “labor of the heart,” says Bill Amelio, who speaks passionately about the schools, students and teachers.  “We’ve nailed the program down as far as what works, what doesn’t.” Now, the question is, “how do we make it sustainable?”

This summer, a Lehigh research team will begin tackling that challenge and another: how to possibly scale the program to all of Cambodia. Titled Sustainability in the Developing World: Can NGO Interventions Create Frameworks for Self-Sufficiency in Education Systems?, the project will  allow undergraduate and graduate researchers in the Mountaintop research program to address the problem of creating and maintaining a sustainable school model within an existing educational system.

The project follows a declaration in 2014 by Cambodia’s Minister of Education, Youth and Sport, Hang Chuon Naron, that Caring for Cambodia is “the standard of education” for the Southeast Asian country.

“We are designating CFC schools as the model schools for all Cambodia,” Naron says. “We need to learn from what has been done here and spread the best practices across the country.”  In 2016, the Ministry’s Education Congress mentioned CFC’s exemplary library and career preparation programs.

Rebuilding a school system

Cambodia still shows the scars of the mass genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, when executions, forced labor, disease and malnutrition resulted in the deaths of an estimated 2 million people, about a quarter of the country’s population. Led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge had sought to bring the country back to an agrarian society, and it persecuted those who were educated, including doctors, lawyers and teachers.

When the Khmer Rouge fell, the country’s efforts to rebuild its school system were hindered by the scarcity of educational leaders.

In starting Caring for Cambodia, the Amelios—Jamie is CEO, Bill is board chair—realized that the organization would have to be founded on sound principles if they wanted it to succeed. From the start, Bill Amelio says, they aimed to make the program sustainable and scalable as well as the de facto standard of education for Pre-K through 12th grade. They wanted CFC students to acquire the skills they’d need to get a job or to pursue higher education.

“We also wanted to stay true to what we do and focus on the critical few [goals] and not the trivial many,” says Amelio, who has held top positions at companies that included IBM, Dell Computers and Lenovo. “That served me well in business, and it serves well in charities. One of the reasons most charities fail is that they want to do too many things, and they have trouble getting things done.”

While the average life of an NGO is less than two years, Amelio points out that the CFC has been operating for 13 years. The first CFC school, which opened in October 2003, served 350 students, with English and computer lessons as part of the curriculum. The following year, another school opened, serving 960 students. As the number of primary, junior high and high schools grew to 21, CFC added programs to enhance learning, including school meals, teacher training, English language classes and an early learning initiative. Dirt floors gave way to concrete or tiled floors, water filtration systems were installed and toilets added.

“Right now, we don’t charge any tuition,” says Amelio, adding that other schools do. “And we started with the poorest of the poor.”

CFC’s “Food for Thought” program, begun in 2005, provides students and their younger siblings with two meals a day. The program now provides some 240,000 meals each month to children and their families.

Amelio acknowledges that he was initially reluctant to launch the program, because he feared CFC was trying to do too much. “After a lot of dialogue, I became convinced it was the right thing to do,” he says. “If you can’t think when you’re at school because you’re hungry, you’re not going to learn.”

Each CFC school has a garden, with students taking care of the crops.

Also, CFC’s hands-on teacher training has resulted in more interactions between teachers and their students, brighter classrooms and more effective teaching, Amelio says. The schools have libraries, and students are encouraged to read. CFC also provides stipends and bonuses to teachers so they do not need to supplement their income.

In 2010, Lehigh began a partnership with CFC to evaluate its programs, run studies and conduct needs assessments, while also providing Lehigh students with opportunities to put theory to practice.

Sothy Eng, professor of practice in Comparative and International Education at Lehigh, maintains the partnership and facilitates Lehigh student work on the ground in Cambodia. Research scientist Whitney Szmodis develops interdisciplinary grants to help support CFC’s efforts. She also has worked with staff and teachers in Cambodia to explore ways to incorporate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) and English language program into the classrooms and CFC programs.

Making a difference

So far, Lehigh researchers have produced some 30 reports and grants proposals, allowing CFC to better assess what’s working as it moves toward sustainability.  Among the findings:

—Students in CFC schools are significantly less likely to drop out of school than those in other government schools.

In the 2012-13 school year, 21 percent of seventh to ninth graders in state schools in both Siem Reap and all of Cambodia dropped out, compared to 8.4 percent in CFC schools.  Among 10th graders to 12th graders, 13 percent of students in Siem Reap and 14 percent in all of Cambodia dropped out of school, compared to 9 percent of students in CFC schools. 

Among first to sixth graders, the dropout rate in Siem Reap was 16 percent, and in all of Cambodia, it was 11 percent, compared to 2 percent in CFC schools.

—Parents who participate in CFC’s village-based pre-school program enroll their children in primary schools (first to sixth grades) 1.5 years sooner than parents who do not participate in the program, a recent study showed.  That’s significant, Eng says, given that late enrollment has been a concern throughout Cambodia, as parents often don’t understand the importance of enrolling their children in first grade at the appropriate age, which is 6.

Eng says CFC’s pre-school initiative is one of the organization’s flagship programs, as it helps prepare young children for learning in the primary grades while also teaching parents about hygiene, nutrition and child development.

“That’s a huge benefit to children in the community,” says Eng, who was born and raised in Cambodia.

To encourage pre-school enrollment, volunteers go house-to-house in Siem Reap to talk with parents about the importance of education. As part of the curriculum, parents learn how to integrate learning into everyday tasks, such as preparing meals. Additionally, says Amelio, CFC works with community members to find or fix a place within the village so that it can serve as a pre-school during daytime hours.

“We’re able to help people get better homes,” Amelio says, “and it actually trains the community in how kids should learn.”
—CFC graduates are more likely to go to college.

A 2012 study showed that 33 percent of CFC graduates have gone on to college, compared to the national average of less than 16 percent.

Putting theory to practice

Through the Lehigh-CFC partnership, Lehigh students gain practical experience, which helps prepare them for careers after graduation. More than 150 Lehigh students have travelled to Cambodia to collect data and implement programs that are related to their coursework. They also have interacted with Cambodian students, making global connections as they share stories and experiences.

“Traditionally (college) students take up to one year after graduation to gain practical experience,” says Eng, who teaches evaluation classes. “Now, with this partnership, students can use the [evaluation] class to learn how to do real studies. They learn how to talk to people. They learn how to come up with research ideas, research questions. They learn the whole process of doing research.”

Among the projects:

Sean Sakdiponephong ’16 was among a team of students travelling to Cambodia in November, and again in March, to evaluate programming.  Sakdiponephong and Laura Dean helped assess an English-language program developed by a Lehigh doctoral student that was still in the pilot stage. They worked with CFC to collect the data before and after the program implementation to evaluate the effectiveness of the pilot project. The two have produced an extensive report on the program.

Teams of students, led by Ronald W. Crane, adjunct professor in Lehigh’s Computer Science and Business Program, worked on a new database system to allow better tracking of student and teacher data, such as grades, absences and health information.  They also trained school staff and administrators in the use of the database.  Crane said students also created a mobile application to collect attendance data for the Food for Thought program. Students are currently working on enhancements to the Health Information module as well as an expansion of the mobile application.

As a Lehigh Iacocca intern in the summer of 2015, Linda Nguyen ’16 worked alongside Szmodis and Kol Sinat, mentor teacher for English as a Second Language, to develop a year-long English curriculum for second graders. Unlike state schools that begin English language learning in fourth grade, CFC schools start much younger.
Aside from the reports generated by Lehigh researchers, Bill Amelio says he finds anecdotal evidence that CFC programs are making a difference. He told of Cambodian students giving power-point presentations and debating each other about work that needed to be done to keep their school clean. 

“When you see that in action, you say, wow this thing is really working,” Amelio says. “These kids are taking great pride in what they’re doing.”

He told another story of a female teacher, trained in CPR, who saved a child who nearly drowned in a river; the village elders had tried unsuccessfully to revive him when the teacher rushed up to help.

“What’s so powerful about that story is, one, it was a woman; two, she did it in a male-dominated society, and three, she took a leadership position in the face of potential scrutiny,” says Amelio. “It’s really quite fascinating to see someone take that kind of leadership.”

Despite the successes, Amelio says that one of the biggest challenges facing CFC is the need to continually raise money to support the organization and its programs. CFC’s annual operating budget is $1.1 million.

This summer, as students at Mountaintop explore sustainability in the developing world, they will examine the CFC model to determine what aspects may or may not be replicable, scalable and ultimately self-sustaining. The students will explore the relationship between Cambodia’s socio-political and economic climate and how that relationship drives discourse around sustainability.

Eng, Szmodis and Mark Orrs, professor of practice and director of sustainable development at Lehigh, will mentor the Mountaintop researchers.