ORANGE BAY, Hanover

Faced with a serious literacy and numeracy challenge, the Rhodes Hall High School here has embarked on an intense campaign to rid the institution of the worrying problem.

And already the efforts of the institution, which opened its doors in September 2006 with 252 grade seven and nine students, appears to be bearing fruit with a current literacy rate of roughly 50 per cent at each grade level.

According to principal Loreen Aljoe, when the school started, 95 per cent of the students entering grade seven were reading at or below the grade four level.

The marked improvement, Aljoe noted, resulted from

a collaborative effort from the teaching staff, who experimented with several strategies.

“We went from begging the students to encouraging the students, and finally we settled on using the reading on the content area strategy, which in the end proved to be a favourite for everyone,” she noted.

The school also revamped its home work programme and implemented an intensive care learning clinic.

The school soon realised, however, that additional resources were needed if they were to reach their target performance.

It is against that background, Aljoe said, that the institution approached, and later secured $5 million

in funding from the Digical Foundation and the

Ministry of Education – through its secondary school enhancement programme – to establish literacy and numeracy resource rooms.

Just over six months after the centres were established, there has been a marked improvement in the general conduct of the students, Aljoe told a ceremony held last Friday to officially declare open the facilities.

The fully equipped, air conditioned rooms boast several literacy software’s such as GeoSafari Phonics Pad, Master Reader, and Geo Safari Math Reader, computers, slide projectors and printers.

And in a brief address at the ceremony – which had in attendance Education Minister Andrew Holness and several educators – Executive Director Digicel Foundation Robert Neish, challenged the students to make the best use of the facility.

The foundation contributed $3.5 million towards building and equipping the rooms.