Veteran educator and entrepreneur Pedro Hall could easily be described as a man ahead of his time.

In 2018 he began to craft the template for a group of schools that would be strictly online, catering to children across Jamaica’s 14 parishes and beyond the country’s borders.

A year later, schools across the globe started rushing to the digital space because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Now, his El Shaddai Home Schools Group — which comprises kindergarten, preparatory and high school with a propensity for evening and weekend school and college educational offerings in the near future — is what Hall is describing as the “way forward and the way out” for parents and guardians who are still in a quandary about sending their children back to face-to-face schooling next month.

“I spent more than a half of my life in the school system — 24 years — and I saw that with the digital age upon us education needed to take a leap from just face-to-face to online. So it’s not only the synchronous (where participants can receive immediate feedback) but the asynchronous (participants can learn at their own pace). It has been done in America for a while now; Jamaica is behind, so we are preparing ourselves for when Jamaica is ready. We will be fully prepared for that,” Hall told the Jamaica Observer last week.

He said El Shaddai, which had originally planned to begin its foray in 2022, had fast-tracked its vision, opening its doors in September 2020 instead with 17 students online and 11 trained and experienced members of staff.

Students were from the parishes Kingston, St James, Clarendon, and St Catherine in Jamaica; with one from New York.

One educator, Hall told the Sunday Observer, taught from France. “Our vision is to cater to you wherever you are in the world,” he explained.

Schools across Jamaica were forced to shutter last March following the first reported case of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19. Since then schools have experienced a series of starts and stops with face-to-face learning resumption efforts stymied by a first, second, and now third wave of the virus.

Just last weekend efforts to vaccinate children 12 and older began in the interest of students returning to face-to-face classes in September. Already, Education Minister Fayval Williams has made it clear the unvaccinated will have to do online classes at home.

“We think that El Shaddai is the way to go and we want parents to know that we are here. With the latest thing now being that only the vaccinated can go face-to-face, we want parents to know it is not all dark. We are here for all those students and all those parents. There is a way out and that way is us,” Hall said.

Noting concerns that online learning has caused many students to fall behind, he said the medium was not to be blamed but rather the strategy or lack thereof.

“I think we have not properly looked at online school because it was forced upon us by the pandemic and it is not structured; it is like the regular school system where you have 30 students or more in one class; that is totally crazy,” Hall pointed out.

“The small classes work quite well, so when we heard people complaining about online learning we were saying ‘no, the problem is how many students do you have in the class’,” he argued.

“When you have 30-35 students in one class online that is dreadful, but when you have like seven to about 10, maybe 15 the most, at the high school level, then you have beautiful classes. So you have individual attention and the students are quite settled. We had no problems. The only issue we had now and then was with the service providers and those were minor and not frequent. We had full school everyday, exams and tests were done online and we did quite well,” Hall shared.

As to sentiments that smaller children are unable to cope with virtual learning he said El Shaddai’s youngest charge, who was two and a half years of age, did well.

“It depends on what happens, because at the kinder school the parents sit in for a while and we take our time and remove the parent; the teachers know how to do that. At that age also it is best to start them online so they grow into it, so they were never face-to-face,” Hall said, noting that other agents of socialisation such as the community and the church would fill the need for peer-to-peer interaction.

In the meantime, he said the school, by virtue of not having any students registered for grade six or grade 10 in the last academic year, had no entrants in the Primary Exit Profile exams nor the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC), but this is set to change in the new school year.

Already Hall said parents have been registering their children for the upcoming school year.

“We have been getting a lot of calls, people are weighing their options, we are on their list for an alternative option. Even today we got a number of calls. A lot of parents have registered and have paid their fees. So far we have processed about 15 applications for new students in addition to what we had from last year,” Hall said.

As for staff, he said the school has received several applications from educators resulting in a pool from which it can choose when the student cohort grows.

In the meantime, he said El Shaddai, which has been using a ready-made platform to deliver lessons, is in the process of developing its own platform which should be completed by next year.

“We are open to going beyond our borders; it is beyond just Jamaica. It is a worldwide bent,” Hall said.