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Workers on the island of Eleuthera work on the former Rock Sound Club for a new technical schools that should provide educational opportunities for Drury students and staff.
Workers on the island of Eleuthera work on the former Rock Sound Club for a new technical schools that should provide educational opportunities for Drury students and staff.

Drury pursues learning center in Bahamas

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While visitors might see the Bahamas as an idyllic vacation destination, professors at Drury University see educational opportunities. And Drury staff and students may soon have a teaching presence at a former resort in the land of palm trees and white-sand beaches.

“We didn’t create a center so faculty could go down to the Bahamas to play,” said Drury professor Dan Prater, who since 2014 has consulted with a foundation in the Bahama Islands for a technical school to address regional poverty. “(The island) has a tremendous amount of issues and they’re all circular because if you don’t have a trained and educated people, companies can’t go down there and hire.”

Prater became involved after talking with Rob Baird of Conco Cos., who has a property in the Bahamas and connected Prater with One Eleuthera Foundation, which is fully funding the effort. He already has made a couple of trips to the islands and has at least two more planned before June.

“Drury will be involved in providing aspects which we’re good at and can help with things they need,” said Prater, executive director of Drury’s Center for Nonprofit Leadership. “We will be training on leadership, nonprofit management and matters like civic engagement and philanthropy.”

Dubbed the Center for Technology and Innovation, it also would provide Drury students and staff chances to teach leadership and management skills to those attending the school.

In January, Prater and Charles Taylor, both Drury communications professors, visited Eleuthera – a narrow island east of the capital city of Nassau – where buildings at a former high-end resort are being renovated for the school.

Prater said there are significant educational needs on the island, noting an unemployment rate around 80 percent and a high school dropout rate of 75 percent.

Rob Baird’s son Andrew said his father was in the Bahamas and unavailable for comment.

Andrew Baird, who has visited the island, said it’s much like a small town in that there are limited educational opportunities and the island is largely dependent on tourism. He said his father also has been active in the Community Foundation of the Ozarks and served on the board of Musgrave Foundation locally.

“He’s spent a lot of time in his life working on foundation-type activities,” Andrew Baird said. “He’s a pretty strong believer that communities can build assets of their own, and if you put structures like foundations in place, people who care about communities also have a way of putting their money to work.”

Prater said nonprofits in the islands need help training board members on best practices, and Drury students, particularly those in the university’s new nonprofit master’s degree program, could be well suited to teach.

“There are some pretty tangible needs for the One Eleuthera Foundation, and more broadly for Eleuthera in terms of capacity building and communication strategies that can work internally and externally,” said Taylor, who is the director for graduate programs at Drury.

In Springfield, Drury has several international-exchange programs designed to give students global experiences to make them more well-rounded citizens and better positioned to serve the Ozarks.

“That’s part of Drury’s mission, to create those global learning opportunities, and we are great at it at the undergraduate level,” Taylor said, noting about half of Drury’s undergraduates study abroad. “I think we can extend that to the graduate level.”

Abroad studies are required for business and architecture students, and Taylor said more recently MBA students have gained global experiences in China or Greece.

In Eleuthera, he said students now seeking a master’s degree in nonprofit and civic leadership are well suited to help because capacity-building for those students is key.

“We want them to think broader than Springfield, Mo., and that we live in a global society,” Prater said. “We’re working on a program to send students down there to both learn about the culture, but also to engage in research and some type of training.”

The relationship could offer Drury students and teachers training opportunities in about a year. Prater, who plans to return to the island over spring break, said the center would not be a satellite campus for the university.

“It would be us helping them, but they’d be providing a good opportunity for our students as well,” he said.

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