THE board of the Portmore Community College (PCC) is currently exploring plans to expand the institution’s capacity by establishing another campus in Greater Portmore, and will also be moving from their present site which it shares with the Portmore HEART Academy, to lands adjacent to the school.

No timeline has yet been set for the project, which, as at October 2006, was quoted as costing $650 million.

The Ministry of Education and the HEART Trust ceded the lands for the proposed development to the college. The 2.2 hectares of land given to the college by the ministry is located on the Hellshire main road, while the parcel given by the HEART Trust is about 5.5 hectares.

Since its inception 15 years ago, the PCC has shared facilities with HEART, but Principal Karen Hewett-Kennedy said the time has come for the college to launch out on its own and firmly establish itself as Portmore’s only tertiary institution.

Hewett-Kennedy was making a presentation to the Portmore Municipal Council at its general meeting Wednesday night.

“We need to expand. Portmore is growing with nearly 200,000 highly educated (residents) wanting their children to be educated and if we can offer more of the lower level courses offered at UTech and UWI, it would mean that the children wouldn’t have to travel to town,” she told the Observer.

“We are the only tertiary institution in Portmore and after 15 years we still don’t have a face so I thought it was important to sensitise the community with what’s happening with the college,” she added.

The principal, who’s in her sixth year at the helm of the school, said the plans to move were driven by an inconvenient lack of space at the current location. She said the college operated from dorm rooms vacated by HEART for their use but that with an enrolment of about 14,000 at the Portsmouth-based campus, PCC had outgrown the space.

“Because of lack of space, there are programmes that we could introduce and there are numbers that we could increase with the programmes that we already have but we have to keep on remembering if I take 10 more students or 20 or 30, where am I going to put them?” she said.

For example, Hewett-Kennedy said, the college has an 18-month enrolled nursing programme but instead of taking in students annually, the space constraint forces admission to be every two years.

“Ideally we would like to take a set every year instead of every 18 months but because we literally have no space, we have to take them every two years and you know the need in the hospitals for nurses so that’s a real challenge,” said the PCC principal.

Other challenges faced by PCC, according to the principal, are the lack of recreational areas for students, as well as eating facilities and a sick bay for staff. She said, too, that there were not enough spaces that allow for quiet or group study, especially since the library was fully utilised by both groups of students. Even extra-curricular activities suffer because the cramped space doesn’t lend itself to all forms of physical activity.

With its two existing campuses (Portsmouth and Old Harbour), the PCC offers more than 26 courses at the CSEC, CAPE, ACCA, AAT, certificate, diploma, and associate degree levels.