Among the more intriguing articles published in the sports section of this newspaper this Holy Week was of a recent function to honour and support student athletes at Sydney Pagon STEM Academy in remote Elim, St Elizabeth.

Hosted by GraceKennedy Money Services (GKMS), the event brought together student athletes, coaches, school leaders, GKMS executives, and Olympic and World champions Mr Hansle Parchment and Mrs Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.

We are reminded that the two track icons are GraceKennedy brand ambassadors.

Sydney Pagon STEM Academy was honoured for being the top-performing school in the GKMS/Western Union Future Champions Programme, which is designed to support and spotlight emerging schools competing in track and field.

Launched in 2024, the initiative targets schools outside the traditional top 10 at the annual Inter-secondary Schools’ Sport Association (ISSA)/GraceKennedy Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships, popularly referred to as Champs, providing financial bursaries and related support.

Others in this year’s GKMS/Western Union Future Champions programme were Manchester’s Bellefield High School and Herbert Morrison Technical High in St James.

Sydney Pagon STEM Academy grabbed special attention with what we are told were breakthrough performances at the recent Champs. These included improving their points tally from 21 last year to 34 combined (14 in the boys’ section and 20 in the girls’) and standout individual achievements.

Applause for the school and its students, motivational talks — not least from Mrs Fraser-Pryce and Mr Parchment — presentation of certificates to the young athletes as well as school leaders, undoubtedly ensured a most satisfying day at GraceKennedy’s Harbour Street headquarters downtown Kingston.

We suspect the function may well have left at least some of those present with a sense of the extraordinary potential of Sydney Pagon STEM Academy for the growth of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.

Also, those with a discerning eye will not have missed the school’s potential for the advancement of sport in rural Jamaica in particular.

First established in 1979 as a dedicated agricultural training institution, Sydney Pagon STEM Academy, which is about five miles north-east of Santa Cruz, is located on close to 300 acres.

While it has moved away from focusing only on agriculture and now embraces all STEM and related academic subjects, its thriving farm sectors have rendered the school largely self-sustaining.

Crucially, Sydney Pagon’s inner campus of 20 acres means there is more than enough land to build out modern sports facilities without compromising agriculture and other elements of the STEM curriculum.

As this newspaper understands it, water for irrigation, so essential for the maintenance of proper playing fields, is readily available from existing wells.

Very importantly, the school has unused boarding facilities which, though run-down and in need of upgrade, have capacity to accommodate upwards of 200 young people.

It seems to us that the opportunity is ripe for the development of a modern sports programme at Sydney Pagon STEM Academy, twinned to its education curriculum.

From this distance we visualise advanced, sustained, instruction and training for talented teenagers in a range of sporting disciplines.

What if Government and the business community could partner in such a venture? The sky would be the limit, in our view.