The iLead education programme, managed by the JNBS Foundation and the Ministry of Education, is supporting 15 of the weakest- performing schools in the parishes of Portland, St Mary and St Thomas (Region 2), as well as education officers in this region, in order to turn around performance in the schools in a sustainable manner.

To maintain the attention on the work of this project, this week we start the first in a series of features on schools participating in the programme.

BRIMMER Vale High isn’t the same school it was two years ago, residents of the rural community near Port Maria will tell you. Before 2012, although there were small pockets of success, there were no significant outputs from the 45-year-old institution, now participating in the JN Foundation and Ministry of Education’s iLead educational leadership programme.

“The school had a reputation for violence,” said vendor Phiona Jackson as she sat across the road from the school gate with her box of snacks and sweets preparing for the lunch hour.

“Every minute police come and carry one of them gone,” she reflected on former days when her 23-year-old son attended the institution as a teen.

There was also some gang violence, noted Denzel Peterson, who has been selling outside the gate for several years.

“One of the biggest problems was the dress code, and it’s mostly the boys,” he said, noting that he often would counsel the young men when they were asked to leave the school compound because of their failure to abide by the dress code.

However, the school has taken a positive turn in the past two years.

Although there are still pockets of indiscipline, from the vendors’ observation, behaviour and performance have improved dramatically.

“Overall, the school is moving up,” said Peterson. “You have students leave from Marymount and St Mary’s High to come here.

“Students leave from all over come here and them getting them subjects,” Jackson added.

It’s a trajectory which Evorine Henry-Tracey, Brimmer Vale’s principal for the past two years, wants to maintain. Still grappling with the socio-political challenges of the 1970s, which divided the community and helped to stigmatise the school, Henry-Tracey and her team are leading a mission to rebuild the St Mary school’s reputation and strengthen its appeal and leadership to attract more students to its underpopulated halls of some 600 students.

“The intake from the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) has not been good in terms of quantity and quality” she disclosed, adding that one year the school enrolled only seven students through GSAT.

“So the morale of our staff was really low, because they believed the ministry intended to close the school, because if you don’t have a grade seven it means in another five years there would be no grade 11.”

To attract more students, the school has employed creative strategies, packaging educational services, particularly its vocational offerings, and vigorously marketing the school to increase intake by transfers. The strategy has increased the grade seven cohort this year to 78, with some 43 enrolling as a result of the GSAT.

The school also has a good music programme, the principal said, which it also markets. And, it has also placed more focus on improving performance in mathematics, literacy and leadership. The plans have been paying off as the school increased the number of math passes from five students in 2012 to 29; and English from 28 to 39 passes last year.

The administrators and educators at Brimmer Vale anticipate that there will be even greater improvements under the iLead programme. The school is one of five eastern institutions participating in the first year of the three-year initiative funded and managed by the JN Foundation and the Ministry of Education. The programme is targeted to high schools and primary schools only in eastern Jamaica, “based on their underperformance”, according to the National Education Inspectorate.

“One of the problems at the institution is that middle managers did not understand their roles in the school; and, since iLead came on board, the change is significant as far as building the capacity of the middle leaders,” Henry-Tracey said of her heads of departments, grade co-ordinators and dean of discipline.

Acknowledging the challenges with leadership across the school community, she noted that the programme came at an opportune time as the school did not have the resources or funding to undertake capacity building in this comprehensive way.

She said the iLead programme engages the leadership in project schools to strengthen the learning environment and consequently student achievement.

“We feel more empowered,” said head of the English Department, Mahalia Palmer. “Before Mrs Tracey, middle managers were not given the task to do certain things; and, therefore, we were not sure of our roles. But since the iLead programme we are more aware of what our roles are and what to do; hence, the school operates smoother.”

Students are also noting the early benefits. Fifth-former Natacia Crawl said teachers are doing more to push students, offering extra lessons, at no cost, after school and on weekends. The youngster, who received a distinction in English language while in fourth form, said the most important change for the school will be the change in how others on the outside perceive it.

“Now we have the iLead programme and we are trying to bring up the CXC average. With the CSEC grades up more students will want to attend Brimmer Vale and that will start to bring around the school,” the teenager opined.

Henry Tracey said in addition to school leadership, community engagement will be critical to improving the school’s performance, noting the less than satisfactory attendance at parent teachers’ association meetings. She said the school is looking at taking the meetings to parents in addition to hosting meetings at the school.

Her move may find favour with residents, some of whom say they want the school to engage them beyond school events.

Jackson suggested that one of the barriers to forming sustainable relationships with the community relates to response from parents.

“They don’t understand that they also have a role to play,” she said.

However, Peterson said the school should go beyond calling residents to support events and conduct its own surveys to gather information on what the real problems are, so that the right solutions can be found to build better relationships.

“The community not involved to that. They support the school, but it needs involvement so that you know what’s going on. So they have to take it to that level and do a survey,” he said. “The district, it’s their school. Most people in the district is there dem children go school, so overall they are going to defend them school.”