In 1997 when Juliet Ellis began teaching at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church’s Holy Trinity Basic School in Maxfield Park, there were all of three students enrolled.

The school was not a new one – it was started in 1978 by Wolde Medhin, a deacon of the Orthodox Church which shares premises with the school – but over time, and for a variety of reasons, community support waned, the children stopped coming and the teachers all left.

Today, there are approximately 115 children enrolled, 10 of whom have severe developmental disabilities like autism, Down’s Syndrome and cerebral palsy. A number of them are wards of the state, resident at the nearby Glenhope Nursery.

Although there is a school fee and a weekly cost for lunch, parents, most of whom live in the surrounding low-income inner-city communities, are not always able to pay. Nevertheless, all 115 students attend classes and eat a hot meal at lunchtime.

And, Ellis boasted, her graduates, who receive regular classes in Amharic, an Ethiopian language, go on to do well at schools like St Peter Claver Primary, Maxfield Park Primary and Rousseau Primary.

Last week, at the Michael Manley Foundation Award for Community Self-Reliance, the school copped the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica Special Award – a grant of $100,000 in recognition of its grassroots efforts to maintain itself and to help it further its development goals.

To run any school, $100,000 is a mere drop in the bucket. Ellis’ monthly wage bill alone, for instance, is $55,000 for six employees. But for Holy Trinity Basic, which, over the years, has literally lifted itself by the bootstraps, the money will go a far way.

Right now, for instance, the cook, caregiver, cleaner and three teachers, including Ellis, who is three years into a teaching diploma at Shortwood Teachers’ College, each take home about $2,000 per week – sometimes nothing at all – depending on whether parents fork up the cash for fees and lunch for the children.

“What I intend to do is to get some advice about how we can put this money in a revolving fund of some sort, where we can draw from to pay for the children whose parents really can’t find it,” said a determined Ellis, who added that the per term school fee this September will be $2,000.

That the school has managed, in less than 10 years, to rebuild itself is testament to the work of low-paid workers like Ellis, and to countless hours of volunteer time donated by residents, church members and parents.

Central to the school’s functioning is a rejection of all forms of discrimination, which means that no child – regardless of religion, financial situation or academic achievement – is turned away, no matter the circumstances.

“We don’t discriminate at all. A child comes, if it’s a pre-school aged child, we take them in and we try with them no matter what,” explained Ellis, who is both head teacher and administrator.

For a whole year after she started, recalled Ellis, she had the same three children in attendance, and just her as staff, responsible for teaching, cleaning the school and cooking for the children.

“What we came to understand was that the school was being stigmatised as a Rasta school, so parents wouldn’t send their children,” she recounted.

To reverse that misconception, Ellis, along with the current chairman of the school board, Ethiopian Orthodox Deacon Michael Greenland, the school’s education officer and the president of the Parent Teachers Association hit the streets, walking door to door through the neighbouring communities to inform parents about the school and convince them to send their children.

“What we found was that there were about 40 to 50 school age children who were not attending for various reasons, many because the children did not have birth certificates,” Ellis explained.

To facilitate those parents, the school held a special registration fair in conjunction with the Registrar General’s Department, but even after gaining the birth certificates, a number of parents kept their children away.

In the end, said Ellis, the skeletal school administration took a massive gamble and offered all parents that took up the challenge of sending their kids to the school one year’s scholarship.

“We had to find some way to let these children stay in school because it’s not their fault that most of these parents have their priorities wrong,” said Ellis. “Some can afford to pay, but they have their priorities wrong, but to me, the children must be in school.”

That first batch of students actually ended up attending school for three years for free, sponsored by people in the community who oftentimes had little to spare, Ellis said.

“After that first year, we went out and got sponsorship for all the children,” she explained. “Individuals would sponsor one child here, one there – even my mother, who used to be the cook for the school, sponsored one child – and that’s how we did it.”

The school is truly a community project, and while some people give cash, others give of their time, which Ellis argued is just as necessary. There are 10 special needs children at the school, a relatively high number, but those children receive no less attention, largely due to the support of volunteer parents.

One parent, Joy Smith Weir, ‘graduated’ from being a parent volunteer to being an occasionally-paid teacher, and now teaches the pre-school class. Weir’s child, who has Down’s Syndrome, has since moved on to primary school, but Weir has stayed put, and is now training to get her NCTVET level 2 early childhood education certification.

Another parent, Lorraine Warren, whose six year-old daughter Anissa Lee Sanchez has cerebral palsy, is the de facto seamstress of the school, providing all the curtains and bed linen.

“Because we get children from Glenhope over the years, we have children of varying abilities, but from I’ve been here in 1997 I’ve been registering these children,” said Ellis.

Visited weekly by officers of the education ministry’s Early Stimulation Unit, these children, Ellis boasted, develop quickly, due in part to the way they are handled at the school. None of the teachers have training in special education, admitted Ellis, but that’s not what it takes, she insisted, to challenge students, handicapped or not.

“The secret is to treat them like normal children,” she said. “That is our secret. We treat them just as a normal child, and from the interaction with ‘normal’ children these children want to be like the others, so they try by themselves to do what the other children are doing.”

Anissa, for example, didn’t walk or speak at all before coming to the school, her mother told the Sunday Observer. Today, she can, with the help of leg braces and a walker, and can, albeit with a heavy slur, identify shapes, colours and even monosyllabic words.

But it’s not just the disabled children who benefit. The development, insisted Ellis, goes both ways.

“We have also noticed that the rest of the school population responds positively to these children,” she said. “They are so loving and so caring, they will feed them, they will wipe their mouths, so it’s good for everyone involved.”

Although many of the children are still sponsored and parents no longer need to be convinced of the value of the school, the problem of funding has never really disappeared.

“Sometimes we put on an event and we raise funds, but largely our teachers are paid by the school fees, so when the parents can’t pay we don’t send the children away, we just go without being paid, sometimes we are not paid for two, three months. But we are still here,” said Ellis.

But even when all fees are paid, the school still faces a challenge in providing lunch, because while some parents may be able to find the money at the beginning of the term, they sometimes experience cash flow problems during the year. Lunch costs $60 per day or $300 per week per student.

But again, at Holy Trinity, that matters not.

“Lunch money?” scoffed Ellis. “That is another problem. But when we cook, we cook for 115 students. We don’t ask who has money or not, everybody has to eat, so we have to bear that cost too. Sometimes we don’t know where it’s coming from, but everyone does eat,” she added with a smile, recounting the miracle of sharing portions intended for a few into a mass meal.