The EUPI Pedagogical Institute will celebrate its 30-year anniversary with a concert of bands in Nicoya on October 25th and a prom in the Curime community hall with Nueva Séptima on October 26th. On November 9th and 10th, there will be a sports festival from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Polideportivo sports complex in Nicoya.
EUPI, located in the El Carmen neighborhood of Nicoya, was the first private educational institution in Nicoya. It currently has an enrollment of about 240 students and 17 teachers.
This private school began operating in 1983 under the name Jardín de Niños La Lechuza (“The Owl” Kids Garden) as an initiative by Eugenia Ovares and Pilar Cardenas. In 1987, to meet the need to give continuity to the educational process at the primary level, entrepreneur Rolando Rodriguez (now deceased) decided to allocate part of Hotel Curime as a location to implement primary education there, giving birth to the EUPI Education Center.
In 1997, by means of the Servicios Educativos Nicoya S.A. anonymous society, which was formed by parents concerned about the future of their children, they decided to buy land in the El Carmen neighborhood in Nicoya in order to have their own location where children could continue with the educational process that they had been receiving since preschool.
Eugenia Ovares, EUPI director, said that EUPI’s seal EUPI is giving “emphasis to discipline. For us, it’s very important and the parents urged discipline due to the decline in the values of public education; they find values here. Success in any area of life has to do directly with discipline.”
With respect to the major challenges they have faced in the past 30 years, Ovares confessed that “especially in the beginning, it was the closed-mindedness that existed in those years by the authorities of MEP (the Ministry of Public Education), who on many occasions inhibited our constitutional rights. When we started the secondary school, the regional director of teaching (from MEP) lost our documents and therefore did not let us conduct high school diploma testing and we had to resort to a constitutional appeal… Now everything has changed, but at first it was difficult,” Ovares indicated.
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