BLACK RIVER, St Elizabeth — Varetta Davis recalls that it was on September 6, 1988 — six days before Hurricane Gilbert cut a path of destruction across Jamaica — that she first opened the doors of the New Town Early Childhood Institution.

Back then, she had just 15 students and she notes with a quiet laugh that though ‘Wild Gilbert’ caused flooding, there was very little lasting damage to her school.

“We lost some charts,” she told Jamaica Observer Central.

Far more challenging was surviving as a school in the New Town Community Centre building without official recognition from the Ministry of Education. Davis says it took an “extremely challenging” seven years before that recognition came.

Today, the 67 year-old principal is “thankful to God” that a $20.599 million-dollar project, 90 per cent of which is to be funded by the Jamaica Social Investment Fund (JSIF), will soon enable her school to move out of a building that has served well but has now done its time. JSIF, a government-sponsored agency mandated to address poverty and community infrastructure, expects the project ro be completed in three months.

Construction work on the new school has already started, immediately adjacent to the old building and next door to the HEART Training centre in New Town. When completed, the project will have provided four classrooms, a kitchen, sick bay, administrative area, sanitary facilities, sewer and drainage system, an equipped play area and fencing.

It’s more than enough space to accommodate the school’s 47 students and four staff members, said Davis.

“I am thankful to God that I did not give up because I have seen the fruits of my labour,” Davis said at last Thursday’s official launch ceremony at the Black River United Pentecostal Church.

She insisted that her school had more than proven its worth. “The school has produced excellent students, including UTech graduates with honours, teachers, police and nurses… This is proof that I have fought a good fight…,” said Davis.

JSIF’s Celia Dillon told the audience that her agency was satisfied that New Town, a residential community located on the fringe of the St Elizabeth capital, Black River, was in dire need of an educational project such as was being delivered.

Research had shown that 55.5 per cent of household heads in New Town had no academic qualifications, Dillon said.

Further, even though 66 per cent of the population is employed, only 19.35 per cent are professionals. The remaining persons are employed in small-scale agriculture and fishery, grocery shops, market sales, and other non-skilled jobs.

The new building project would meet “the requirements of the Early Childhood Commission whose inspection in 2010 revealed that many aspects of the school’s physical environment are lacking”, Dillon said.

Under the project arrangements, $1.495 million of the project cost will be provided by the community in “cash and kind”. Several speakers including Sharon Dasman, school board chairman; Blanzie Blake of the Early Childhood Commission; Elizabeth Sanderson of the Social Development Commission; and Councillor Mordant Mitchell of the Black River Division reminded residents of their responsibilities to assist the project as well as to protect it.

Mitchell, who is deputy mayor of Black River and head of the parish council’s Education Committee, said the council had provided a 100 per cent waiver on the building project. He told the audience that the parish council was committed to being a “main partner” in the development of education in St Elizabeth.

Guest speaker for the launch Dr Lyndon Johnson, an agro-processor and natural product chemist, urged adults to find ways to help their children visualise for a better future.

Children, he said, should be helped to become “inventors” and “creative thinkers”.

Young ones should be enabled “to look in the woodlands around us and see not just bush but raw materials and to be able to convert these into wealth”, said Johnson.

“We should help them to find their vision,” said Johnson. “It’s just as easy to say ‘Queen’s Council’ as it is to say ‘cruff’; why do we say ‘cruff’ when we can say ‘engineer?'” he said.