Bus fare support being rolled out to help Newell High students

With more than 400 students in St Elizabeth still absent from classrooms months after Hurricane Melissa swept through the parish, the St Elizabeth Homecoming Foundation has launched a new initiative to help restore attendance at Newell High School.

The programme, led by the foundation’s chairman, Donna Parchment Brown, will provide bus fares, taxi fares and other transport assistance to students whose families were left struggling after the storm. Many communities in the parish were among the hardest hit during the hurricane, which destroyed homes, disrupted livelihoods, and severely undermined parents’ ability to send children back to school.

According to Superintendent of Police Coleridge Minto, roughly 400 students – based on checks at only a small sample of schools – have not returned to classes since the hurricane.

Newell High School, one of the institutions affected by prolonged absenteeism, has responded with a 15-week project aimed at supporting students, especially those preparing for external examinations in June.

Principal Audrey Ellington says that the need extends beyond transport. “Both male and female students are in need of personal care and hygiene products,” she notes, adding that the school has issued an appeal for assistance.

The St Elizabeth Homecoming Foundation has taken up part of that challenge. Alongside covering transportation costs, the organisation is collecting and distributing hygiene kits to help stabilise students’ daily routines. The aim is to remove practical barriers that discourage or prevent pupils from returning to the classroom.

Speaking on behalf of the foundation, Parchment Brown says that the crisis has strengthened its resolve.

Established in 1995, the organisation has long focused on education and human development in the parish. The devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa, she says, has fuelled a renewed determination to fulfil its mission “to mobilise and encourage all St Elizabethans, their friends and supporters The Best of St. Bess to share together in the economic, social, environmental and cultural development of the parish”.

Police and parish authorities have expressed concern that the number of students missing from school is likely far higher than the 400 already identified, since the figure covers only a fraction of schools. Many families remain without electricity, stable shelter or basic necessities, making daily travel to school increasingly difficult.