THE early childhood institution in the community of Banana Ground, Manchester, has a building all its own, and a new name too.

It is called Barbara E Lee Hing Banana Ground Basic School in honour of the late Barbara E Lee Hing whose family, along with Christos Ministries, in partnership with Food For The Poor (FFP) Jamaica, donated the funds for the work.

The new facility boasts three new classrooms, a sick bay, a computer room, an office, modern toilet facilities, and a playground. The premises were officially handed over on Friday, January 22.

Denise Foster, vice-principal, could not not hold back her tears.

“I have been with the school for the past 11 years and I am so thankful to God for this new building,” she told the

Jamaica Observer.

“We have fought for this for years, and to know that it has finally come to pass, I can say, ‘God is good’. The situation before was very dismal. We were located on the compound of a Seventh-day Adventist church and we had to pack up every Friday afternoon and every Wednesday afternoon before church was held. We had to take down all our charts, pack away all the children’s desks, teacher’s desks, everything. Then, come Monday morning, we had to redo the whole process again, and where we stored our stuff was actually on the dirt of the ground. So it was a very rough task for us,” she explained.

Member of parliament for Central Manchester Peter Bunting, and Education Minister Ronald Thwaites were present at the handover.

Bunting said he remembered when the school was housed in the Seventh-day Adventist church, and was relocated to its current location in an abandoned clinic building next door to its current spot.

“We’ve had three schools built by Food For The Poor in my constituency in the last two years, and for this, we are very grateful,” he said.

Added Thwaites: “Building a new school building and renaming it in the memory of someone who contributed significantly to the sector of education is a very high act. For the family of the late Barbara E Lee Hing to donate funds to build a school in her honour demonstrates a family who have reached the heights of what good human beings can become, by being their brother’s keeper.”

The Hing family chose Manchester because that’s the parish in which Barbara E Lee Hing was born, in 1943. She started her career in the field of early childhood education before teaching at her alma mater, Manchester High School, before emigrating to the United States.