The Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School's namesake, Carlos Manuel Rosario, was born in Puerto Rico, into a family of educators. During World War II, he served in the Army in North Africa, France, and Germany. He moved to Washington, DC in the early 1950's, and later joined the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. As he realized that better services needed to be rendered to the Latino community, Carlos Rosario embarked on a mission to establish organizations to meet those needs, and did so with great success and dedicated leadership.
One of the earliest and most enduring of the programs Carlos Rosario founded was the Program of English Instruction for Latin Americans (PEILA), established in 1970. PEILA was based in a building on Irving Street in Columbia Heights and addressed the critical problems created by language barriers and by the lack of culturally appropriate information available to the immigrant community. Marcelo Fernandez served as the first Director of this program geared to adult education and under his direction PEILA quickly grew and its classes filled.
At a dinner party two years later, Carlos Rosario met a Puerto Rican woman named Sonia Gutierrez, a professional educator who had recently arrived in Washington. He persuaded her to volunteer for PEILA. "It was a day that changed my life," she later recalled. Her work with PEILA became all-absorbing as she learned not only about the school, but about the acculturation process and the problems of its students. Within a few months, she was running the program.
In October 1972, Ms. Sonia Gutierrez became Director of PEILA and transformed the small, under-funded English as a Second Language (ESL) program into a comprehensive adult education program. In 1974, PEILA was integrated into the District's public school budget. The Office of Right to Read of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare named it one of the best literacy programs in the nation. Ms. Sonia Gutierrez had found a mentor in Carlos Rosario, and in her, Rosario had an ally who was committed as he was to bettering the plight of immigrants. Pedro Lujan, a Peruvian businessman and activist, soon joined in their efforts when he became the first School-Community Coordinator.
Ms. Sonia Gutierrez eventually relocated the program to accommodate growing demand and renamed it the Carlos Rosario Adult Education Center. It grew to provide 2,400 students per year with crucial language, cultural and vocational skills and accumulated a waiting list of 2,000. The school continued to serve as a model as delegations from other states and even other nations frequently visited the center to review its operations and curriculum seeking to replicate the success of its program.
Over thirty years, 60,000 students, and a myriad of awards later, what began as PEILA continues as The Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School, still guided by the visionary leadership of Sonia Gutierrez and the legacy of Carlos Rosario. Pedro Lujan, now retired, supports Ms. Gutierrez in leading the school by serving on the Board of Trustees.
Carlos Rosario's endless determination and devotion to help the community proved fruitful, as could be seen in the creation of the following programs, most of which still exist today:
