American's big goal: Build a middle class in Mexico

PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico — A few years after retiring to this Pacific resort city, David Bender was bored with golf. His new hobby, the American decided, would be tackling Mexico's income inequality. He would do it by teaching English to Mexican children.

The former advertising executive saw working families hungry for affordable English-language instruction and a shot at upward mobility for their kids.

Credit a seasoned adman for knowing his market.

Fewer than five years since its founding, Colegio Mexico-Americano has become the largest school in Puerto Vallarta. Enrollment has grown to 1,135 students, with dozens on the waiting list.

Not bad for a project that began in August 2002 with a few preschoolers learning their ABCs.

"We saw a tremendous need," said Bender, 71, a former Chicagoan. "We are trying to build a middle class in Mexico."

Link to jobs

Some might chafe at the notion of an American who speaks little Spanish presuming to remake Mexican society. But the school's enthusiastic reception here speaks of parents' desire for their children to learn English in a town where most of the good jobs require it.

There are few developing nations with more to gain by teaching its citizens English. About 85 percent of Mexico's exports go to the United States. Americans and Canadians constitute the majority of its international visitors. More than 400,000 Mexicans migrate illegally to the U.S. each year in search of work. The money these expatriates send home — $23 billion last year alone — is a pillar of Mexico's economy.

But while Spanish-speaking nations such as Costa Rica and Chile have seized on English fluency as a key to global competitiveness, Mexico has done little to prepare its youngsters. The government requires just three hours a week of English instruction for three years during Mexico's equivalent of junior high school, often by teachers who don't speak the language well.

"Pencil. Window. Door. It was useless," said Jose de Jesus Alcantar Delgado, a Puerto Vallarta workman, recalling his rudimentary lessons. Lack of fluency has kept him from higher-paying employment in the city's resorts.

A chance for children

Experts blame scarce resources, an inflexible teachers union and widespread resentment of U.S. hegemony. But Puerto Vallarta mother Kenia Salazar Torres isn't buying it. English is standard in elite academies where the children of Mexico's wealthy matriculate. Salazar wants the same chance for her three boys.

Her oldest son, Jose Rodolfo, 9, has a partial scholarship to Colegio Mexico-Americano. Salazar earns the rest by rising before dawn to prepare refried beans for local markets. Her husband, Arturo, is a ticket seller at the bus station. He's trying to land a better job to earn tuition money for their twin 5-year-old sons.

Jose helps out by collecting cans to earn recycling money. The serious, handsome child knows what's at stake.

"That's how you get a good job," he said softly in Spanish.

Only so much golf

Such stories keep the balding, bespectacled Bender focused on his all-consuming second career.

Bender found his calling in advertising, eventually starting his own agency, Chicago-based Bender, Browning, Dolby & Sanderson. Bender prospered. He and his wife, Gloria, moved into a stylish oceanfront home north of Puerto Vallarta in 2000. It was time to slow down, enjoy the good life.

But the kinetic Bender found he could only golf so many rounds. The chasm between Mexico's haves and have-nots gnawed at him. So did the corruption that stifles so much entrepreneurial activity here.

Education, he reasoned, was the remedy.

He helped raise scholarships to keep low-income children in class with money for uniforms, supplies and other extras not covered by the government. Then he got a good look at the public schools. He saw teeming classrooms, crumbling facilities, poorly trained teachers and pitifully low expectations for students.

Conversations with the mostly Mexican congregation of his local church, the New Dawn Christian Center, led to the idea of launching a secular, nonprofit, bilingual school that working-class families could afford.

Bender spearheaded a fundraising effort, hitting up friends in the U.S. for money to clear a junkyard and build three classrooms on rented land. Colegio Mexico-Americano opened its doors with 35 preschoolers and the goal of adding a grade every year through high school.

But as the school expanded, Bender spotted a trend that disturbed him. Slots were being taken by the children of well-heeled parents who knew a bargain when they saw one. Annual tuition and fees are $2,645 for a grade-school student. That's 40 percent below the city average for comparable private schools.

"I'm looking at all these fancy cars pulling up and I'm thinking ... we're not here to perpetuate the society that Mexico already has," Bender said. "I don't want to be a revolutionary. I just want to give ordinary Mexican families the chance to get on the bottom rung so they can climb up themselves."

Bender said he and school administrators dismissed reviewing a family's financial standing for admission criterion as unworkable. The solution, they agreed, was a bigger campus to take all comers.

Appealing to parents

But no bank in either Mexico or the United States would lend them a peso, much less the millions needed for land acquisition and construction. The school appealed to those with the most at stake: parents.

Some risked everything.

Maria Elena Covarrubias Ibarra pledged her home as security to a landowner who agreed to sell the school 5 ½ acres on installment. Forced to quit school at 16, Covarrubias said she would rather leave her grandkids an education than a house.

Others raided their savings accounts and mattresses, extending unsecured loans on little more than a handshake.

The new school opened in August 2005.

Daily instruction is split almost evenly between Spanish and English. The school counts eight Americans among its teaching staff of 84. U.S. donors have provided loans, scholarships and gifts, including the Olympic-size swimming pool that is one of the school's most successful recruiting tools.

The atmosphere is more Mexico than Americano. Students dressed in uniforms of white polo shirts and blue pants or skirts honor Mexican heroes at the weekly flag ceremony. The school song exhorts them to be "the new generation that Mexico needs today, people with integrity ... made to govern."