Sudbury Primary gets Champions of Change Award from Yummy Bakery

WESTERN BUREAU:

Sudbury Primary and Infant School in Orange, St James has been publicly recognised for its efforts to ensure its students’ nutritional needs are adequately met, with representatives from Yummy Bakery awarding the school’s administration with the company’s inaugural Champions of Change Award on December 28, 2023.

Although Yummy Bakery has collaborated with Sudbury Primary School since 2018 in supporting the institution’s feeding programme for students, the school’s principal Susan Davis noted that this was the first time she and her staff members had been awarded for their efforts in this fashion.

“To be truthful, I am so elated, I am so pleased, because I feel as if my accomplishment has started. I feel as if I am doing something that is tangible to society, and it is something I always dreamed of, because I know for a fact that I am an agent of change,” said Davis, who has been at Sudbury Primary’s helm since 2019.

“I feel good, especially for our kids, considering where they were, and where myself and my staff have taken them from, and where they are now. My dream and aspiration is to change at least one child, to teach them and see them growing up in society and being somebody of value,” Davis added.

The Champions of Change Award was presented to the school on December 28 to highlight the efforts made by Davis and Althia Palmer, Sudbury Primary’s guidance counsellor, to provide the school’s more than 236 students with balanced meals, thus providing an incentive for more of the student population to turn out for classes regularly.

Lindel Robinson, Yummy Bakery’s agency manager, told The Gleaner that the partnership between the company and Sudbury Primary, which bolstered the breakfast programme and in turn helped improve student attendance, was encouraged by some of Yummy Bakery’s Montego Bay-based agency representatives who are past students of Sudbury Primary.

“Sudbury Primary has been doing stellar work, and we started working with them five years ago because the student population turnout at the school was pretty low. We have team members here at the agency who are past students of Sudbury, and that was how the connection happened,” said Robinson.

Weekly contributions

“It is a rural school in a farming community, and the students were finding it a little difficult to go to school on some given days because the parents did not have the money for lunch and for bus fare. We started to give the school weekly contributions to help for providing meals for those needy students, and the student population turnout started to grow,” Robinson explained.

“They were at 50 per cent student turnout, and now they are almost at 100 per cent student turnout on a daily basis as a result of the fact that they are able to come to school because they are provided breakfast, lunch, and in some cases dinner.”

In addition, the feeding programme has since morphed into a larger initiative where Sudbury Primary is seeing to the greater needs of students for the sake of their overall academic experience, including a recent presentation of supplies for the children ahead of their return to school for the start of the upcoming term on Monday, January 8.

Delcine Haughton, whose grandson is among the students benefitting from Sudbury Primary’s feeding programme, praised the school’s administration for their initiative in seeing to the needs of their young charges.

“I feel good about it, because the breakfast programme benefits the children a lot. Some children never used to come, and when they learned about it they started to come in the morning, as well as my grandson. They are doing a fine job down there at Sudbury Primary School,” Haughton said enthusiastically.

christopher.thomas@gleanerjm.com