A Fresh Look for our Youth School

In the past few weeks a few improvements have taken place at Youth School. With lots of volunteer labor from our students, school manager Kungkea took the lead on getting all the walls cleaned and painted, and all the classrooms now have attractive colors and a fresh feel. In addition, an old dilapidated cement wall was torn down and a new wall with a fence constructed. The wall will soon be decorated with a mural, as will one side of the building.

Youth School is the first school to be painted as part of our new “Perfect Schools” program where our teams are working to maintain, organize and find ways to improve our school facilities. This is one way we plan to create conducive learning environments, and we feel providing higher standards are a key ingredient to behavior change and development. We also want to incorporate art, creativity, and fun throughout our activities and expect to have “Perfect Schools” as a goal that we always keep working toward.

EYC is lucky to have a new art teacher, Mr. Matte Birchler, who is an accomplished artist from New Zealand who has recently relocated to Phnom Penh. Matte has done many big murals in the past and is excited about using his talents to engage his students at Youth School in making some murals for everyone to appreciate.

Another new volunteer to Youth School is Ms. Joy Clifton, who comes to the school twice a week to read with the students. Joy has moved to Phnom Penh from Vancouver and is passionate about both kids and books, so she felt this volunteer job was just right for her.

Youth School is happy to announce our new computer teacher for the evenings, Ms. Sem Leaphy, who is a recent graduate from an intensive 2 year technology training program (only for poor students), and works as a web developer during the day. She will be teaching blogs and basic website programming in addition to the Microsoft suite. When asked about her new teacher, Youth School student Veng Chhenghak said “she is very friendly, punctual and serious in her teaching. She is a really good teacher.”