Keeping up with St. Michael’s 

Just outside the hustle and bustle of downtown Kingston lies St. Michael’s Primary School, a friend of the Digicel Foundation and one of the three special schools adopted for infrastructure upgrades by our patron, Denis O’Brien. The gift is Mr. O’Brien’s way of saying “thank you” to Jamaica for awarding him with the Order of Distinction.

Our spruce-up job at St. Michael’s so far includes construction of a new entrance for added security of the premises, replacement of desks and chairs, set up an Enrichment Room to improve the students’ literacy and numeracy skills, installed computers and handed over 200+ tablets. The school’s canteen and lunch area also got a facelift. Other upgrades included fixing the plumbing system and relocating the Special Needs Unit to the ground floor to make easier for students to enter.

Most recently, to complement the new cafeteria where teachers and students can sit and enjoy their lunches together, we invested US$6,000 to keep the school feeding programme going and ensure that more children will have access to proper nutrition.

The team at St Michael’s had some good news for us too, as 18 of the 30 students who sat the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) were placed in traditional high schools, a huge improvement on previous years.