After leaving her native Lancaster County to teach in the Dominican Republic, Laura Bottia experienced what it’s like for students from another culture to study at Charis Academy in Hazleton, where she is the new head of education.
Bottia was student teaching at Abraham Lincoln Middle School in Lancaster when she noticed how students from the Dominican Republic and other nations were expected to fit in.
“Assimilation often looked like them leaving their language behind and not using it the classroom, losing the celebration of their holidays and adapting to a community that wanted them to look and act like they did,” Bottia said.
Bottia’s move to the Dominic Republic in 2013 began an odyssey that took her to schools in Egypt and Venezuela and back to the DR where she had been a school administrator when she heard about the opening at Charis.
“The moment I saw it, ‘Oh, this sounds very interesting,’” she recalled thinking. “Service learning and opportunity-based learning: This is the vision I have been praying for in a school.”
Bottia was the first to apply and the only candidate who confided that she believed God was calling her to Charis Academy.
Mike Jarrell, executive director at Charis, conducted an international search with a consultant from Lehigh University, but eventually had the same feeling.
“After months of interviews, conversations, prayer and seeking wise counsel,” Jarrell said, “I became convinced that God was calling Laura to Charis.”
Providing an education centered on Jesus that prepares students to be innovators and servants in their community is part of the mission statement for the non-denominational, K-12 school that changed its name from Immanuel Christian after nearly folding in 2024.
Bottia sees her role as supporting what Charis Academy does well so it can continue to grow.
“I’m not coming in with a philosophy or vision that is going to change anything but honing great things that they’ve been continuing,” she said.
Charis is becoming known for placing students into community settings. From the school’s classrooms at 40 W. Hemlock St., students walk through downtown to art classes at Hazleton Art League and science sessions in a lab at Lackawanna College. In May, high schoolers working with the Hazleton LaunchBox showed off their plan bring the school’s thrift store downtown, cooperate with other second-hand outlets and create a Thrift Store Alley to attract shoppers and boost the city’s economy.
Lining up partnerships with those and other organizations will top Bottia’s agenda when she starts work on July 27.
Sending students in the community prepares them for challenges, even if they’re just going outside in cold weather.
“Being prepared helps students navigate the community and utilize resources. As they continue to grow, analyzing and knowing the needs … they have an early foundation in being leaders and driving for the success of Hazleton,” she said in a telephone interview from Kansas, where she is vacationing with her husband’s parents.
She met her husband, Juan, when they were both teaching in Egypt. He is Colombian, recently earned a master’s degree in mental health counseling and plans to work as a counselor when they move to Hazleton with their children, Juan Luis, 4, and Sandra Iñes, 1.
Like students at Charis, Bottia has taken her own classes outside the classroom. They’ve learned scuba diving in Venezuela and paddleboarded into mangrove swamps to gather data that they presented at an environmental conference in the Dominican Republic.
Science was her first specialty. She studied chemistry at Desales University in Lehigh County and worked in a laboratory at Hershey Medical Center when she decided to teach.
“I realized I wanted to have a bigger impact on the world. If I can inspire just three students to be passionate then I’ve made the impact three times beyond what I could do myself, Bottia said.
Her fluency in Spanish will help in Hazleton, where 70% of the children who attend the surrounding public school district are Hispanic, and 28% are learning English.
Like them, Bottia has been immersed in a language that was foreign to her.
While she took two years of Spanish in high school and two more in college, Bottia, who when asked to describe herself, said she has blonde hair, green eyes, snow-white skin and freckles, arrived in the Dominican Republic speaking “taxi-cab Spanish.”
“Speaking every day enabled me to pick up the language quite well,” she said.
When she moved to the Dominican Republic without knowing anyone there, she got things wrong. On arrival, she thought a man with a loudspeaker was giving a missing child alert, but he was only offering to buy used merchandise.
“All that is part of the learning experience that challenges who you are but also helps you to grow and understand what’s God’s purpose is for you,” Bottia said.
She had a choice to move to a different country.
“Choice brings a lot of power,” she said, “Sometimes our students don’t particularly have a choice.”
That’s why she wants to help Charis, which rhymes with Paris and means “grace” in Greek, celebrate Spanish and any other languages that students speak and celebrate where they’re from.
She also will remember something else that she learned in the Dominican Republic, where she said the motto seemed to be tranquillo or calm, which she translated as chill out.
“It is so important to take time to speak to someone. To and see how they’re doing is worth the weight of gold in their culture,” said Bottia, whose friends in the Dominican Republic arranged for their friends in Hazleton to help her when she flew in for an interview at Charis last month. “It comes down to deep listening, hearing what the person says and why they are saying it, being open ear and open heart for everything it is that they are … It creates a sense of belonging that is irreplaceable.”
