Civil Service Association to Establish Resource Centre in Kingston

President of the Jamaica Civil Service Association (JCSA), O’Neil Grant, says that the organisation will be establishing a resource centre in Kingston.

He noted that the facility, which will be situated in the Tarrant community, will cater to residents of the area as well as children of JCSA members.

Mr. Grant made the disclosure at a Jamaica Information Service (JIS) Think Tank held on September 9 at the agency’s regional office in Montego Bay, St. James.

He said that an agreement has been reached with the National Works Agency (NWA) for the acquisition of a building owned by the agency to house the research centre.

“It is one of their old training sites, and we are now going through the process of the design and [pinpointing] whatever improvements are needed, and, hopefully, we can at least start the project in this our 100th year,” he noted.

Mr. Grant told JIS News that the resource centre will offer numeracy and literacy programmes for children and adults, and facilitate homework and Internet-based research.

He noted that the decision to include adults came out of the JCSA’s bimonthly reading programme for children in the Tarrant community, where it was recoginsed that some parents who participated needed support.

“We recognised that there was a deficiency in their ability to read and to do mathematics, and what we decided to do was have an adult numeracy and literacy programme at our resource centre,” Mr. Grant said.

“We are going to be talking to the HEART Trust/NTA to tie our programme to their programme, so that when the parents graduate, they can be registered in the HEART Trust programme and become more attractive in terms of employment,” Mr. Grant said.