ALPS, Trelawny — The Alps Primary School, nestled in the farming community of Southern Trelawny, is to close its doors at the end of this school year, due to its dwindling student population.

The State-run institution, which was reclassified years ago from an all-age school to its present status as a primary school, currently has on roll 56 students and three teachers, including the principal, according to data from the education ministry’s Region Three office in Brown’s Town, St Ann.

According to school board member Sheryl Gibson- Brown, the decision to close the school was conveyed to members of the Alps community earlier this year, during a meeting with officials from the ministry of education.

“We have to face reality. Personnel from the ministry of education Brown’s Town [office] came and had a meeting with us [parents, school board] and the community. So, we have to face reality that it is going to be closed,” Gibson-Brown told the Jamaica Observer West.

When school reopens for the next school year, Alps Primary students and teachers will be transferred to nearby schools, including the Ulster Spring Primary, located approximately five miles away from Alps.

Meanwhile, Member of Parliament for Southern Trelawny, Marissa Dalrymple-Phillibert, has lauded Education Minister Rev Ronald Thwaites for being receptive to her idea “to use the end of one era as an opportunity to start another on the grounds of the closing Alps Primary School”.

“I said to myself, why don’t we open a new campus of the edu-skills centre [that was started at the Albert Town community centre] to teach young people about farming and other disciplines, and I thought, Ia wonder if the minister would lease me this school, so that we could open a facility to teach the young boys that farming is not something dirty and is the way forward,” said Dalrymple-Phillibert during the launch of the Ira V Brooks Memorial Foundation for Education.

The function was held on Sunday at the Wire Fence New Testament Church of God in South Trelawny.

When contacted on Tuesday, Rev Thwaites pointed out that it is not sustainable to operate the Alps Primary School, considering its very low enrolment.

The need and the methodology of offering education at that institute a hundred years ago may not be the best way to do it now. It costs about three times the amount per unit to offer education in those very small schools than it does per se, in larger schools, and the results, unfortunately, from those [smaller] schools, tend to be uniformly way below expectations,” he argued.

He said that while a decision is yet to be taken on the use of the facility when the school is closed, he believes that training in agriculture “could be a great idea”.

“So much has been invested by the Baptist church and by the community over many years in that school which is at the centre of a small and perhaps dwindling community, but we want to make use of the investment that has been made,” he explained.