Teacher Absent Often: Building Sustainable Schools from the Inside Out

In early 2001, Kari Grady Grossman and her husband adopted a little boy from Cambodia, and in turn adopted his country, discovering a personal connection to a little known and long-suffering people. Feeling the need to give back to the beautiful, struggling country of their son's birth, they decided to have a school built in his honor in the rural countryside. But the building was just the beginning.

"Teacher Absent Often" is a frequent phrase uttered by students and their parents to describe the dismal state of Cambodia's education system. In Teacher Absent Often (Youth Edition), Kari weaves fascinating stories of learning to empower one poor, marginalized, illiterate community to sustain a school for their children. She reveals something every developed world do-gooder should know-how to help people in the way they want to be helped, not the way we think they should be helped. To read Teacher Absent Often is to feel the call to action.

Kari Grady Grossman is the Founder of Sustainable Schools International and the author of ＂Bones That Float, A Story of Adopting Cambodia＂, which won the 2008 ＂Peacemaker of the Year＂ Award from the Independent Publishers Association, and was named a Gold Memoir by the Nautilus Awards for ＂World Changing Books.＂ Prior to writing her first book, she spent nearly a decade traveling, writing, and producing documentaries that appeared on Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel Online, including coverage from Mount Everest and the Alaskan Iditarod. The author is a 1990 graduate of Syracuse University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with her husband and their two adopted children, Grady from Cambodia, and Shanti from India. In 2008, the Colorado Parents’ Day Council named her and her husband ＂Colorado Parents of the Year.＂ Kari will expand part three of ＂Teacher Absent Often＂ (Youth Edition) to create her next adult work, ＂Sustainable Schools: A New Model for Success.＂