 FIRST HIGH SCHOOL OPENS IN CAYE CAULKER
August 26, 2008
The first ever secondary school in Caye Caulker will be inaugurated this Sunday. OceanAcademy, Non-Profit, CommunityHigh School was founded by educators and residents of the island village with support from donors and fundraising events. We spoke to Vice Principal and Co-founder Joni Miller.
Joni Miller, Vice Principal and Co-founderOceanAcademy
“So the first year we are offering three classes; three years, first form, second form and what we call our bridge prep year. That’s for students who didn’t have a lot of success in standard six or who found primary school very difficult and are not quite ready to go onto first form but don’t want to go back and repeat standard six again. It’s a preparatory year where they are going to work hard on their core skills like math and English so that when they are ready to go into first form they are going to be the top students. They are going to be really strong and academically confident. The following school year we plan to add third form and then forth form. We have also had a lot of interest in the community about night school but we have been saying focus on the kids first and then we will look at night school the following year. Our first form is full; we have a class size of fifteen students for every teacher. In second form right now we have five students and we have eight students in our bridge class.”
But because Ocean’s Academy is a private institution, funding for the school is provided through generous donors and charity organizations. For this reason, the academy created a website to facilitate donors and provide information about the school and the students.
Joni Miller, Vice Principal and Co-founder Ocean Academy
“The reason we created the wed-site is because we are not funded by the government. It’s a completely private school in the sense that we are raising all the funds ourselves. The way that we finance the school is the families are asked to pay $200.00 Belize a month and the rest of the tuition comes from donors. On the web-site we have little videos of each student saying why they want to go to OceanAcademy and their photo. People can go to the web-site and make a contribution online and that’s where we’ve been getting the majority of our funding at this point.”
Miller says that the institution will offer the core subjects that are a part of the Ministry of Education’s curriculum with a little added touch of the Caye Caulker lifestyle.
Joni Miller, Vice Principal and Co-founder Ocean Academy
“Some of the things we wanted to do at our school to make it different and exciting for our students because a lot of these students they either had given up on the hopes of going to high school or just were not interested anymore. And so some of the things we do in addition to we follow the Belize curriculum so everything that the ministry of education has for high school we offer. We also offer enrichment areas and the enrichment areas are Marine Biology in our Integrated Science class. Our goal is one lap-top for every student; right now we have twenty eight lap-tops that have been donated and hopefully more are coming. The idea is that every student must have a laptop on their desk and so the teachers will integrate the use of computers and research in their daily lessons. We have a smart board which is a very large white board and it’s an interactive computer system so the teacher can teach using the computer but all the students can see it on the wall. It is called a smart board. We also offer Spanish for native speakers as well as regular Spanish classes. Our PE program a lot of the kids are really excited about is on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays we have what we call water tourism and team sports. The water tourism will be starting new week with kayaking and then they will be learning swimming strokes, life starting skill, wind surfing, sailing, snorkeling, intro to scuba all these things are a part of Caye Caulker’s economy and most likely a lot of them will be getting a job in those industries are all a part of our PE program.”
The land and the building for the school were donated by Dane Dingerson. He also serves on the board as founders along with Principal Heidi Curry. Anyone wishing to assist Ocean’s Academy or need more information can log on to the website at http://www.cayecaulkerschool.com/.
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