(ANS – Punta Arenas) – Last Saturday 5 January, the educative community at Don Bosco Institute, Punta Arenas celebrated 100 years of service, a century spent in offering quality education to the young, as Don Bosco himself would have wanted. Forming “good Christians and upright citizens” has been, from the outset, the task entrusted to Salesian missionaries and educators.
Don Bosco Institute was founded precisely on 5 January 1913, a Sunday, by Bishop Joseph Fagnano, sdb, when he was Prefect Apostolic of Magallanes and Superior of the Salesians in Patagonia – a circumscription that then included Chile and Argentina.
In those years Punta Arenas had 15 thousand inhabitants and in the educational scene there were just primary and secondary schools but no other structure which could offer young people technical education. This is why Bishop Fagnano, a dreamer capable of great enterprise, bought a large property on the outskirts of the city, almost in the pampa – according to documents of the time, at the crossroads between the future arterial roads, Avenida Bulnes and Avenida Sarmiento – and had a large and appropriate construction built to house a technical institute. He had it named “Don Bosco” in honour of the founder of the Congregation.
The institute began by offering courses in printing, carpentry, boot-making and mechanics. In 1920, seven years after its foundation, the IDB also began courses in primary education, due to the huge development at the time in the city, and to serve the population that had begun to string along the Avenida Bulnes and the suburb of Prat.
Today the IDB is a private but subsidised institute which has opted for a system of shared funding, with contributions coming from the State and from pupils' families.
The IDB offers three kinds of learning, regulated by the respective decrees from the Ministry of Education
Published 09/01/2013
