Along Riviera Nayarit’s Glittering Coast, Teachers Sleep in School Closets Maya Piedra - GPJ Mexico
go to original October 30, 2023

José Manuel Hernández, the former principal of Mar Patrimonial Technical Secondary School, enters one of the rooms where school staff sleep during the workweek. (Maya Piedra/GPJ Mexico)

Hours after her students go home, science teacher Cynthia Cervantes settles in for a long night: She and her 6-year-old son shuffle into a computer room closet and drift to sleep on a shared mattress. They live at the school during the workweek — making meals with a blender and microwave, washing themselves in a school restroom and storing their clothes in cardboard boxes — and travel to their hometown, 120 kilometers (75 miles) away, on weekends and holidays. So do five of the school’s nine other teachers. So do three maintenance workers. So did the principal before he left the job. They can’t afford anywhere in town.

Mar Patrimonial Technical Secondary School is in San Francisco, on the glittering stretch of coastline known as Riviera Nayarit. In recent years, housing costs have soared beyond the paychecks of many educated professionals. Teachers often face a wrenching choice: live at the school or leave. Many eventually choose the latter. In the last three years, the school hasn’t had instructors at various points for biology, Spanish, physics, history, math, English and art, among other subjects.

Other schools face the same problem. In Sayulita, just 7 kilometers (4 miles) south of San Francisco, maintenance workers and 1 out of 7 teachers live in the local secondary school, Revolución Mexicana — which started the school year in August without English teachers, says professor Patricia Duarte. She adds that, usually, those who don’t have family in the area try to pool resources to share a house, or count on the solidarity of locals who offer a room for a token rent.

Students worry that the churn is robbing them of knowledge they’ll need to ace university entrance exams. In 2022, Casandra Abigail Cárdenas Delgadillo, 13, carried the Mexican flag during the local parade commemorating the Mexican Revolution anniversary, an honor reserved for top students. But when Mar Patrimonial’s chemistry position went vacant during the 2021-2022 school year, Casandra simply didn’t learn the material — instead, she kept the grade she had before the teacher left and was advanced to the next level. “I’m nervous because I feel like I haven’t learned everything I should have,” Casandra says.

Parents fumed, and in November 2022, around 40 of them staged a protest in front of the school. State education officials quickly filled the vacancies, but within weeks, more teachers had departed. “We hope that these vacant positions are filled soon so that we can avoid these problems that cause students to suffer,” says Mar Patrimonial’s former principal, José Manuel Hernández, who left the position at the end of the 2022-2023 school year, shortly after his interview with Global Press Journal.

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