LEEDS, St Elizabeth

The moment you enter the building that houses the Leeds Basic School, a few miles from the bustling St Elizabeth capital Santa Cruz, you get a strong feeling that the institution is serious about educating its young students.

The raft of interesting teaching aids that take up almost every inch of space on the walls of the buildings, chalkboards, as well as cupboards in the four classrooms would suggest that ‘learning is fun’ at the more than 50-year-old school.

And so when the Observer West arrived at the institution during the lunch break on Monday, it was not difficult for school principal Monica Byroo to convene a class before the end of the scheduled break.

“Come on, children, let’s do some revision,” Byroo said to a number of children who were still in the school room having their lunch.

The students, who range in ages from three to six, quickly put away their meals and hurried to Byroo’s classroom. Within minutes, they were settled and raring to go.

The pleasant Byroo, 48, dips into a multi-coloured box and pulls out a piece of cartridge paper with a word emblazoned on it.

“What word is this,” she asked firmly.

“Mother,” the class responded.

“Very good,” she replied. “But not so loud, and you must remember to answer in a sentence.”

The veteran educator, who has been teaching at the institution for almost two decades, then pulls another piece of small cartridge paper from the box and asked the tiny tots to identify it.

“That is the word animal,” the class said in a chorus.

“Excellent,” Byroo responded, and quickly asked the class to identify more ‘challenging’ words.

Convinced that the kids have now mastered the art of spelling the given words, she proceeded to ask the very enthusiastic and energetic students to identify, write, and spell several numerals.

For the most part, all the children were excellent, but six-year-old Howayania McLean – one of the female students seated in the front row – was exceptional.

“She is excellent and she is not the only one that is doing good here,” the principal boasted.

Byroo, who was born in St Catherine and later relocated to St Elizabeth, has spent all of her teaching career at Leeds Basic. While admitting that educating the very young could be challenging at times, Byroo said she nevertheless enjoys her job.

“It is very challenging. We have to know our children. We have to understand them, and know about their environment, but we enjoy doing it,” she told the Observer West

She added that her staff at Leeds, which consists of four female teachers – Allison Byroo, Victoria Brown, Diana Campbell, and Dian Mullings – places a premium on interactive learning to keep the more than 60 students on roll focused.

“We keep giving them activities, and we try to make our lessons colourful and interesting so that they can grasp it,” the principal stressed. “If, for example, we are doing some work and we don’t make it interesting –and colourful then they won’t participate.”

Following her relocation to St Elizabeth in the 1960s, Byroo attended the Mount Osbourne All-Age School, and later Manchester Business College and St Elizabeth Technical Extension School.

She has since pursued several courses in early children education, and attended several workshops organised by the Ministry of Education, in order to better equip herself for the teaching profession she so enjoys.

“From these workshops and seminars, we get a lot of ideas that we use in the school and this has helped us to help the students,” she said.

At 48, the hard-working and dedicated Byroo said she has no plans to leave the profession “anytime soon”, stressing that she is enjoying every moment of it for the “time being”.