Our Story

Graduation procession ascends through the Campus, 2021

Our founders

mission-group-foto
Dr. Rosa Elena Bello is pictured in 2020 with the graduates of the Tourism major in the Technical Institute, after they finished a two and a half year program that had been funded by the Coen Foundation of Nicaragua.

Margarete Guillete at the Free High School Graduation Nicaragua
Co-founder Margaret M. Gullette at a graduation ceremony in 2013 for the first group of Technical Institute graduates. In 2002 Dr. Bello named the school after her without telling her. 

US Advisory Committee

Caroline Cross Chinlund
Connie Wilson Higginson
Roz Feldberg
Ruth Comstock
Valerie Miller
Valerie Miller
Stephen Chinlund, 1933 -2020

Spring 2020

Margaret describes how the FHS is coping with Covid-19

Students describe in very personal terms how life-changing their relationship to the FHS has been, in a 2017 video made by two volunteers from Boston College.

Celebrating the Opening of the first Campus building in 2017

2017 Inauguration
Photo by Kelvin Marshall

At the ceremony on Opening Day, the representative of the Random Acts’ donors, Cinde Monsam, received the keys from the builder, Austin Drill, and symbolically handed the keys to the rector, Dr. Rosa Elena Bello, with co-founder Margaret Morganroth Gullette beside them cheering. 

Also visible on the dais is the Orator of the day, Dr. Sergio Ramirez, esteemed Nicaraguan  novelist and essayist, winner of the Cervantes Prize, known as “Spain’s Nobel Prize for Literature.” Dr. Ramirez  donated copies of some of his many books, signed, to the new Library/ Computer Lab. His remarkable speech about the need for truly public education (call it “A Complete Orchestra”) can be read on  https://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/CMS-16826438

Photo by Kelvin Marshall
Photo by Kelvin Marshall

Floricita la Suerte

la flor
Playa La For

by Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Poor Nicaragua, so far from God, so close to the United States.(Nicaraguan saying)

Read the essay