MONTEGO BAY, St James — Typically donated to individual students who use the funds for school-related expenses, proceeds raised from this year’s Howard Ward Benefit Foundation’s MoBay Night Run will be given to a school. Anchovy High in St James will use the gift to repair the damage Hurricane Melissa did to one of its campuses, and this will have positive spin-offs for its almost 2,000 students.

“I was speaking to the principal, Dr [Laverne] Stewart, a short while ago and 800 students are still out of place, having a challenge attending school because there is not enough classrooms,” Howard Ward, the driving force behind the foundation and charity event that bear his name, explained Tuesday evening during a media launch held at Pier One.

“When we reached out to Dr Stewart, she welcomed us with open arms, invited us for a tour. It was a frightening sight,” he said sombrely.

Ward was referencing the total destruction of Anchovy High’s junior campus which is located in Montpelier. As a result, the school has had to rely solely on its main campus in Anchovy, which is also facing its own challenges following last October’s Category 5 storm.

“Classrooms gone, limited places for children to learn, so we decided to take on the challenge of assisting them with the rebuilding and the restoration,” Ward said.

Principal Stewart said the damage done to their Montpellier campus has been a challenge, given the school’s large population of more than 1,700 student who are usually spread across its two locations.

“We would have suffered really, really badly from the hurricane. Our junior campus, which houses our grades seven and eight students, would have been totally destroyed, that’s in Montpelier, that campus houses 757 students,” she told the Jamaica Observer following the event.

“The Ministry of Education, Youth, Skills and Information has been working to get at least the main campus of our school up and running, so we know that is in progress. But even if our main campus is repaired, we still do not have enough space to house the 757 students,” she explained.

This is why the Ward Foundation’s gesture is so greatly appreciated.

“We are indeed very grateful for this offer because it is our hope that our junior campus in Montpelier will be repaired so that our students can go back to a normal school day,” said Stewart.

She sees it as a step in the right direction as the school exhausts every avenue in its quest to find the resources needed for repairs.

“From our own cursory preliminary estimations, it could run at least $150 million, or maybe $200 million,” the principal said.

It remains to be seen how much funds will be raised through the charity run. Scheduled for April 4, it has so far received $1 million in sponsorship support from the Chinese community. In addition, event partner GenXS Jamaica Carnival, through their Director Kino Johnson, has pledged $100,000.

For now, Stewart and her team are doing their best to provide a comfortable learning environment for their young charges.

“As it is, our students are on a rotation basis, that’s how we are having them and we have been experimenting with several models. We have been doing a model where they are out of school for some days,” she explained.

Plans are under way to ensure students spend more time doing face-to-face classes, but challenges will remain.

“As of March 2, we’re going to try another model which will have students coming to school every day but on a shift basis. Even with that, we’re still out of space,” Stewart lamented.

“Everybody knows that shift is not the most ideal model because of the shortened instructional time. So it is our hope, and we are working assiduously, as much as we can, to get our school back to some normal sense of attendance,” she added.

Chairman of the Howard Benefit Foundation Howard Ward, speaking during Tuesday’s launch of Howard Ward Benefit Foundation’s MoBay Night Run.