By Robert Andre Emmanuel
Hoping to give his students practical experience in business management and agriculture once again Acting Principal of Barbuda’s Sir McChesney George Secondary School eyes the end of 2024 as the completion for the first phase of the poultry pen reconstruction on the school grounds.
The poultry pen project once helped to supply the local supermarket on the sister isle with eggs, Acting Principal Rexford Harry told Observer media, before Hurricane Irma destroyed everything in 2017.
“The facility that we’re rebuilding right now is appended with both broilers and layers, and there’s also a section that we’re hoping to use as a storage facility because the building that we used for that in terms of storing tools and the equipment for the agricultural science department, all that was destroyed,” he said.
The project, which is funded through a partnership with the granddaughter of Sir McChesney George and her church, St Luke’s Episcopal Church, as well as grant funding from the Global Missions Commission, the work to revive what was once the norm has begun already.
However, it had not been all smooth sailing in the project with the principal revealing that “virtually all” the chickens which were bought to be part of the rehabilitation had been lost recently.
“To start our project in terms of preparing the students for SBAs, we had received 51 chickens, but we have lost virtually all of those, some to the passage of Hurricane Philippe because where they were being housed wasn’t the most ideal,” he said.
He added that another 26 chickens were brought in to ensure secondary school students on Barbuda could complete their assignment; however, he said that an animal had managed to kill the chickens before they could get to the slaughtering stage.
The hope, Principal Harry said, was that once the chicken facility is completed, students across various departments could benefit greatly from the practical experience.
“What we are hoping to do is to help the students see how to get an idea of the practical application of the theory that they are learning inside the classroom, and so the business department will be involved in terms of marketing and record-keeping, specifically for the accounting students.
“The IT students, we’re hoping to get them involved in in terms of creating labels and even in terms of coming up with pairing up with the business with Internet, getting creative ways to market our products once we’re able to get the production up and running,” he told Observer.
The Sir McChesney George Secondary School head noted that while the construction phase of the project is funded and underway, persons who might be interested in supporting the school and students once the building is completed can help through the supply of equipment or supporting the students’ products.