Sia Barbara Kamara
“It’s so impressive to see how enthusiastic they are. One woman could only spell Jesus. Now she can write her own name and those of her children”
Early Education and Adult Education
Sia Barbara Kamara likes to point out that she was “kicked out of kindergarten” while a Peace Corps teacher in Tappita, Liberia, in the early 1960s. She was a middle school math teacher when, as a favor to a friend, she “moonlighted” teaching his ABC class so he could finish his own education. “We don’t let foreigners teach below third grade,” she was told by school officials. The Ministry thought her math teaching was wasted on middle school, too. In order not to lose Sia Barbara to Monrovia, her principal assigned her to the high school. In the summers, she taught higher mathematics to teachers at the Zorzor Teacher Training Institute. But she had learned a valuable lesson in the ABC class. For Sia Barbara, the seed had been sewn for a career caring about early childhood education (ECE) that would make her a legend in the field. Back in the States, teacher training in her native South Carolina brought her the opportunity to look into a new program, Head Start. She visited every program in the state and codified the board rules for the program, all the while fighting a rear-guard battle against segregationists. In 1978, President Carter’s team persuaded her to come to Washington, D.C., where she would make a big difference. President Carter appointed Sia Barbara associate commissioner in the Department of Health and Human Services, responsible for the National Head Start Program, the Appalachian Regional Commission child development programs, child care regulations, and research and demonstration programs. She managed a budget of approximately $1B. When she started, 100,000 children were served in a program that grew to include 122 million under her watch.
Head Start
When administrations changed at the federal level, she was recruited by Mayor Marion Barry to take care of ECE in D.C. She stayed through four mayors, ensuring safe and reasonable childcare, Head Start, and a lot of what a child needed to grow up smart and have an equal chance at life, as she describes her role. When Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly threatened Sia Barbara’s job during a budget crunch, Marian Wright Edelman and Katharine Graham called the mayor to say they could not do the job without Barbara Kamara. Sia Barbara, as she prefers to be called, has garnered more awards than this newsletter has room to list. In 2010, UNICEF by chance noticed her Liberia connection and invited her back to advise the Liberian Ministry of Education. More than five decades after getting kicked out of kindergarten, she is helping to redesign the way young children in Liberia learn. Meanwhile, she noticed that Friends of Liberia, WE-CARE and HIPPY were designing the Family Literacy Initiative, which teaches parents how to work with their pre-school children to get them ready for school. So, she volunteered to help. She visits the FLI sites often and is a key member of FOL’s Education Committee.
Continuing Her Mission
Four years later, Sia Barbara is particularly touched by the mothers and grandmothers who have come to the Adult Literacy Program that FLI has started at night as a pilot in two communities, Caldwell and Duazon. “It’s so impressive to see how enthusiastic they are. One woman could only spell Jesus. Now she can write her own name and those of her children,” Sia Barbara says. “They are all women who responded. Most of them work in the markets, so this is helping them do their business.” She says it appears that the women were motivated by the fact that their 3- and 4-year-olds are starting to read and they cannot. Many had not had the opportunity as girls to attend school, or the civil wars forced displacement and abandonment of formal education. “When the FLI home visitors go to the homes, they are often crowded, so they sit in the yard on a bench with the box of materials each parent has. Other children in the family and friends from the neighborhood come to watch. After the first year, when neighbors saw what the benefits were, it was easier to recruit families.” In fact, there is always a waiting list for the available slots in the program. The only barrier to expansion and sustainability is resources. We strongly urge you to read the FLI reports. The reports are in PDF and housed at the bottom of the page. Please review these reports to see this program’s impact in evaluation results.
Below is Sia Barbara- Embracing, Educating, and Empowering the people of Liberia
