A Falk Teacher Volunteers at a School for the Children of Cambodian Migrant Workers

In March, Falk third-grade teacher Becka Wright will be traveling to Thailand and spending a week as a volunteer teacher. She'll be working at a school on the island of Koh Chang that serves the children of Cambodian migrant workers.

As undocumented immigrants in Thailand, the workers are not entitled to send their children to Thai schools. Kru Uan, a former civil servant, has worked to address this need by offering Cambodian Kids Care (CKC), an independent and under-resourced school that he runs on a volunteer basis.

For her birthday, Wright received an airplane ticket to Thailand. As she researched things to do there, she stumbled upon a website for CKC.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, I don’t need a vacation, I need to do this,’” she says.

CKC is in a one-room schoolhouse serving 30 to 40 children, aged 5 to 14. The children are undocumented, as are most of their parents, who have come to Koh Chang for service jobs at the island’s resorts or for construction jobs. Most students and their families live in a valley on the island dubbed “Little Phnom Penh” because of the number of Cambodian immigrants living there.

“I’m most excited to work with a completely different group, culturally,” Wright says. While she has worked with under-resourced children in her career, those experiences took place in the American education system.

Uan runs the school with donations and volunteers like Wright. One of the aspects of her teaching stint she’s most looking forward to, Wright says, is the challenge of operating in an environment that is so completely independent.

“It’s just Uan, this building, and whatever donations they get,” she says. “It forces you to be creative and think fast. I’m also interested to be immersed in his approach, which is more about keeping these kids safe and educationally engaged all day long.”

She adds, “What Kru Uan is doing, he really is putting the kids first. You want to talk about ‘holistic’: he feeds these kids. He drives around the island picking them up for school in his modified songthaew.”

Wright started her teaching career at Shaed Elementary School in Washington, D.C., deemed one of the District’s most dangerous and worst-performing schools.

“It doesn’t get much more under-resourced than D.C. public schools,” says Wright. “But if I had not started my teaching career there, I would not be the teacher I am today.”

Teaching in that kind of environment requires creativity and self-sufficiency, Wright says. Her time at Shaed, she says, “helped me understand what it means to advocate for students at all costs.”

Working again with students in an under-resourced school is one aspect of her Thailand trip that Wright is most looking forward to.

“It’s pretty easy to get lulled into this sense of ‘I’ve got this,’” she says. “So I feel like it will really put some pep in my step as a professional to go back and teach in an environment that, quite frankly, makes D.C. public schools look decently resourced.”

While she is gone, Wright plans to talk daily with her class at Falk. Koh Chang is 12 hours ahead of Pittsburgh, so when students video chat with her at 9 a.m., Wright will be greeting them at 9 p.m. after a day of teaching.