HE was born and raised in a tough inner-city community, fully understanding the workings of the area, which prepared him to be the man that he is today.

Donovan Roland Isaacs, the 58-year-old head of St Andrew College in Cross Roads, South St Andrew, has lived his dream of emerging to be one of the nation’s finest in his chosen field of endeavour.

And the groundwork, he insists, was laid by his upbringing in the inner-city community of Jones Town, where his parents raised him and his 10 siblings, to adequately prepare for all the possible challenges of life. His mother, Dorothy Isaacs, a former music teacher, acted as vice principal of Jones Town Primary School, before moving to Trinity Primary, on the outskirts of the St Mary capital, Port Maria. Her presence alone was an inspiration to her children and, by extension, the wider community.

Isaacs was not only born and raised in Jones Town, but he excelled at the Trench Town Comprehensive High School where he was enrolled as a student from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, becoming head boy in his last year at the institution.

“The inner city is a university by itself. It taught me everything I know, and primarily it taught me how to deal with different categories of people,” he told the Jamaica Observer during a recent interview.

“It also motivated me as a youngster, with respect to achieving. I could compare those in the community who achieved and those who did not. That motivated me to say I don’t want to be the boy like that, or I want to be like that one. You want to excel, to achieve, and that is what prompted me to try harder.

“So the inner city was nice. We came from the traditional family in which you had to walk upright, discipline yourself going to school, be well put together, because there was the extended family taking care of the people in the neighbourhood. Education was very important within the families,” Isaacs said.

Isaacs, who also owns the Institute of Higher Learning and is part-owner of Avondale Preparatory School, was born at 18a Septimus Street, close to a sports giant of the community, Franklyn “Bowla” Morant, who, among other things represented Kingston College on the school’s all-conquering Manning Cup football teams of 1964 and 1965, as well as Sunlight Cup cricket.

Following his early training at All Saints Infant and All Saints All-Age schools, Trench Town Comprehensive beckoned, and consistent academic and sports performances spurred him to becoming head boy at the school in 1974, the last of two years that he played Manning Cup football. It was he, the left winger, who scored the first goal of the 1974 season, albeit in a 1-2 loss to Calabar High.

Trench Town had been enjoying good form during the era of the late 1960s into the 1970s, having won the Walker Cup knockout title, and producing talented players such as the late Herbert “Dago” Gordon, Devon “Roots” Lewis, and Romeo Taylor.

Though he never tasted success, he also ran the 100 metres and 400 metres for his school at the Boys Athletic Championship (Champs).

But it was soon time to concentrate more on his academic work, what with the incentives for sport severely limited at the time.

Isaacs, an A student in Mathematics, landed a pre-trained teaching job at the Papine Industrial Training Centre.

“At that same institution, they sent me on training at the VDTI (Vocational Development Training Institute) to train as a related subject teacher of Mathematics, English and Technical Drawing.

“After awhile, I left the VDTI and went to Charlie Smith Comprehensive to teach maths and technical drawing.”

With sport still oozing from his system, Isaacs started to coach the Charlie Smith ‘Colts’ (Under-16) football team, leading it to the Corporate Area title in 1978. It was the same time that he enrolled in a certificate course in Mathematics at the University of the West Indies, after which he left for the Kingston Secondary School to teach maths and technical drawing.

However, his talent as a football coach was again sought by Charlie Smith, where he went in the afternoon to coach the Manning Cup teams, reaching the high point of making it to the semi-final stage twice and eventually getting to the competition’s final in 1986, losing 0-1 to Kingston College, the last time that KC won the title.

He later left the programme because of internal issues.

In all of that, Isaacs still had a mission to accomplish.

Finally leaving Kingston Secondary School in 1992, he started the day school division of the Institute of Higher Learning that same year. Eleven years later in 2003, St Andrew College was born out of the Institute of Higher Learning, which later became an institution of continuing education.

With his training, it is no surprise that both schools are heavily vocationalised.

Right after the birth of St Andrew College emerged Avondale Preparatory School, founded around a decade ago on Retirement Road, of which he is part-owner.

Now, Isaacs is facing tough financial challenges in trying to keep his institutions afloat and relevant.

“The prep school might be profitable, but the high school and the continuing school are not profitable now,” he disclosed.

“Our students at the high school come from the Ministry of Education. Students are placed here through the GSAT (Grade Six Achievement Test) and the GNAT (Grade Nine Achievement Test). Less than 10 per cent of the school is private students, the other 90 per cent is government-placed and due to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the government not having any money, they have cut back on the placement of students, and this is why we are not now profitable.

“It’s difficult to manage, but the training that I got from doing my Executive Master’s course at the Mico University along with the Mona School of Business, in respect of the school management and leadership, makes us use strategies to keep us afloat,” Isaacs said.

“I am not totally happy with the progress that the school has made over the last five years. We have two sections — academics and vocational. Academic students do both academics and vocational, but the vocational do just vocational. We are the top independent school when it comes to vocational education and training,” said Isaacs, who revealed that St Andrew College’s enrolment had fallen to just over 400 students now, down from over 1,000 at one stage.

Despite the financial challenges, St Andrew College still manages to enter the Corporate Area’s major sporting competitions — the Manning Cup in football, Grace Shield cricket and ‘Champs.’

Discipline at St Andrew College has been on the improve, compared to three years ago when there was cause for concern.

“About three to five years ago, it was somewhat bad, in that we had underperformers who didn’t want to go to class or do anything, but right now we are great. It is extremely good… no boys wearing pants below their bottoms, or sewing up the sides. We had a problem then in getting them to conform to the rules of the school and we used to lock them out because of how they dressed.

“We give the students a test or project every three weeks. When the results are out we call the students and tell them their results and whether or not they are performing up to what we expect, and which tests they were absent for. Since we started that, we have been getting better results, because the children realise that we are following their progress,” said Isaacs.

The winner of the Prime Minister’s Award for education in 2009 and former President of the Jamaica Independent Schools Association does not see a longer road ahead for him in education, having all but done most of what needed to be done in the field.

“I was thinking that at the stage that I have reached in education, I still want to give back and I will continue to do so. Maybe politics would be an area in which I could look at branching out into, since there is really nowhere else to go in education.

I am giving serious thought to this. The greatest problem is getting people to buy into your philosophy. But I want to continue serving in whatever capacity that I can,” he said.

After 39 years in the business, Justice of the Peace, and former tutor of statistics at the Mico University, Isaacs is not even thinking of expanding his education empire, because of the softness of the economy.

“You can’t start a high school unless the Ministry of Education says that it can support it. Putting in infrastructure and then there are no students doesn’t make sense. The numbers every year are not consistent. If we were getting a constant number of students every year, then it means we could finance ourselves,” Isaacs said.

Having got over the murder of his brilliant brother, Aaron, an outstanding teacher of physics and chemistry, who was gunned down in 2002 close to the Central Police Station in Central Kingston, Isaacs can also feel good that his sons and daughters have made him proud and continue to do so.

One of his sons is a Professor of Chemistry at Holy Cross University in the United States, another son is a member of the United States Army, now posted to Japan, two daughters are reading for their first degrees at the University of the West Indies, while the last child is pursuing CAPE subjects, having excelled with 12 passes at the CSEC level.