Hanover schools get a second tech resource Hub

WESTERN BUREAU:

Bethel Primary School in Hopewell, Hanover, on Friday joined Lucea Infant School as the schools from the parish to be outfitted with technology resource hubs to help students develop greater mastery in mathematics. 

The two Hanover schools join Westmoreland’s Maud McLeod High School and Grange Hill High Schools as the four recipients of such facilities in western Jamaica.

The resource hub, which was commissioned into operation at the Bethel Primary School, is the third one being financed by the Hanover Charities organisation, which is based in Hopewell. Grange Hill High and Lucea Infant school are other two schools to have benefitted.

The facility at Bethel Primary will serve the 16 schools in Eastern Hanover, which makes up the Ministry of Education’s (MOE’s) Quality Education Circle (QEC) 35.

“We are talking about putting in the hands of our children 21st century equipment to really develop creativity and innovation that we speak about,” Dr Michele Pinnock, the director in the MOE’s Region 4, told The Gleaner following the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

“These are the resources that will help our children with the maths and the numeracy that we want to improve,” she said, citing Singapore and Finland as places where this worked worked in terms of teaching maths in a way that moves it from “concrete to abstract’.

“These resources will help our children to move from manipulations to understanding concepts,” she added.

The resources referenced by Pinnock speaks to a wide variety of technological equipment and tools that have been gifted to the school to make up the hub. The items include different types of laptops, digital and meva cameras, STEM classroom bundle kits, simple machine kits, document scanners, projectors, wall-mounted charging cabinets, mathematics Kits, human skeletal models, educational robot sets, STEM engineering and design Kits, Micro Pro microscopes, primary science magnifiers, cross section of the human brain model, public address systems, charts and chart stands, and write and wipe fact family boards.

“This resource hub is extremely important to us. You are talking about children having access to microscopes that they would normally see when they get into high schools. The children of Hanover will now be exposed to that type of equipment, which will see them starting in front of their peers when they reach high schools,” Pinnock said.

According to her, the dream of the MOE’s Region Four is to make the children of the region “future ready”. She expressed confidence that with the type of technological exposure that they will be experiencing within the hub, they will do exceptionally well in the future.

Katrin Casserly, chairman of Hanover Charities, told The Gleaner that, collectively, the equipment provided for the three hubs provided by her organisation cost approximately $26 million.

She explained that the stakeholders sought to do something in the parish that would be long-lasting, after experiencing the damage done by the passage Hurricane Melissa, which impacted several schools.  

“I have only just now learnt, after the three presentations, what an enormous impact these hubs will have once we do it right,” said Casserley, who noted that the advice to provide the equipment for the education hubs came from the education ministry.

She also promised to work alongside the MOE to see to the full implementation of the resource hubs, as they represent another instance of giving back to the community of Hanover.

Kadian McNeil-Ellis, chairman of Bethel Primary School, described the handing over as a significant event for the entire cluster of schools within the MOE’s QEC 35.

“This resource hub stands as a beacon of knowledge, and a wealth of opportunities for teaching and learning,” she stated, adding that it is a place where ideas will flourish, creativity will start, and collaboration between schools will grow stronger.

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