Alison Bixby Stone School

The Alison Bixby Stone School (ABSS) is a small, bilingual elementary school serving students in preschool through the sixth grade. ABSS is housed on the campus of the Escuela Agrícola Panamericana (EAP) located in the rural Zamorano Valley, 30 kilometers east of Tegucigalpa. Founded in 1953, ABSS was initially established to serve the needs of the EAP’s employees, and for nearly forty years, ABSS offered Spanish-language classes to the children of Zamorano. In recognition of the contributions of Doris Zemurray Stone, supporter and board member of the EAP, the primary school was named after her daughter, Alison Bixby Stone. In 1992, a group of Zamorano parents gathered their resources, hired a local kindergarten teacher, and opened an independent bilingual nursery, Maternal Madre Tierra, in one of the homes on the EAP campus. Two years later, a motivated group of Zamorano parents began a movement to merge this bilingual preschool with ABSS, and in 1994, the two schools united, with English becoming the official language. As the initial group of bilingual students moved toward graduation, ABSS progressively replaced the standard national curriculum with a bilingual one, and in 2001, ABSS graduated its first group of bilingual sixth graders. Today, ABSS employs a highly qualified, multi-national teaching staff of 18 and serves a student body of 138. While the majority of ABSS students are Honduran, our extensive scholarship program and low tuition rates ensure a socio-economically diverse student body. This year, forty-two percent of our students receive some sort of financial assistance to attend, including five boys from a local orphanage, Jovenes en Camino.