White Marl Primary School gets assistance to log on

This Friday the White Marl Primary School in St Catherine will be receiving seven laptops at a handover ceremony at the institution, courtesy of Tropical Sun Food, a company out of the United Kingdom.

The school's principal, Milton C. Brown, who has been using his motorbike to reach absent students, said he has been receiving a tremendous amount of support and feedback since he shared his story in the October 5 publication of THE STAR. Brown recently purchased the motorcycle, which he calls the 'Ministry Machine', and once he locates the students, he then sees how best he can assist them to get logged on.

"I honestly did not know that THE STAR readership was so wide, and I am really thankful for everything. Persons have been reaching out from all over. The word has been getting around in a major way, and persons have been pledging their support up to yesterday (Monday). Currently, there are persons in the US who are trying to get us some Chromebooks for the students, but they are having a challenge with the importation and the duties attached to them. So, we are asking the Government if they can help us with that," he said.

The educator said he has also been receiving pledges from other persons who are prepared to offer assistance.

"What we have done is do deeper research to see how many Chromebooks and other items we need, because we are not going to provide for the greedy, but the needy. So we have wind it down to about 65 units that is needed for the students to be fully functional. We are pushing for Chromebooks, but where we get laptops, we will give those to the upper-school students who are about to transit to high school," he said.

The education ministry estimates that 120,000 students were unable to take up online instruction for one or more reasons in the last academic year, including not having an electronic device or Internet access to attend classes since the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools in March 2020.

Almost 300 students are currently enrolled at the school, and Brown says the numbers continue to grow as the registration process continues.

Brown said 'Ministry Machine' and his team are still doing their rounds in White Marl and surrounding areas to locate absent students.

"So far we have found over a dozen students. What we find out is that when we find one student, we tend to find multiple, because there are usually more than one of our students living there. So when we find like siblings, we count them as one find instead of saying we find two or three. We feel really encouraged," Brown said.

White Marl Primary is among the 376 primary schools selected to reopen for face-to-face classes, beginning on Monday, November 8.

"Because of how small our classrooms are, we are still going to be on a rotation system, which means that half of each class will come into school each day and the other half will stay home and engage online in terms of synchronous learning eventually. But we cannot do it now because the Internet access at our school is not 'boasty' at all. As a result our students will use learning kits on the days when they are out, or work will be placed in the classrooms by our practitioners. The students that were not engaged since school closed, and the ones we could not find, will attend face-to-face classes every day," he said.