Holland High School Teacher Triumphs Over Adversity

For secondary school educator, Daniesha Onfroy, teaching has never been merely a profession—it has always been a calling, nurtured long before she ever entered a formal classroom.

As a child, her playtime became a rehearsal for the future: trees stood tall as attentive students, teddy bears transformed into eager learners, and every corner of her imagination echoed with the lessons she longed to share.

Make-believe blossomed into a lifelong passion, shaping the educator she is today. Yet the clear sense of purpose Ms. Onfroy carried would later be tested by a quiet struggle she could not yet name, one that followed her into adulthood and began to challenge her identity as a teacher.

That struggle would later be identified as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a neurodevelopmental condition that affects attention, behaviour and impulse control.

That passion — rooted in Ms. Onfroy’s love for English Language and Literature and inspired by her own teachers — eventually led her to pursue a Bachelor of Education in English in 2020. Yet her college journey unfolded in ways she had never imagined.

“My college experience was bittersweet. I was fighting a mental war while going to college,” she recalls, explaining how she balanced her final year while wearing a mask that said, ‘I’m okay, I am strong’.

After entering the classroom as an English Language teacher at Holland High School in Trelawny, the symptoms of her condition began to weigh on her work and challenge her sense of purpose.

On some days, Ms Onfroy, who now serves as Acting Senior Teacher and Grade Eight Supervisor at the institution, was energetic, creative and fully able to meet her responsibilities.

“So, on good days… I got things done on time. [However, on other days, the experience was markedly different]… I was present physically, but mentally I felt absent. It felt as though I had lead on top of me. I just could not move, I was in the passenger seat of my own life,” she explains.

Reflecting on that period, Ms. Onfroy says her connection to teaching began to shift.

“There was no passion behind it… no purpose. It felt like this was not for me [and that] I was robbing myself, and robbing the students,” she shares.

To cope, Ms. Onfroy broke her day into small, manageable tasks, finding structure in simplicity as a way to steady herself amid the challenges she faced.

“I would put ‘wake up’ on my to-do list… the smallest details… just to go through the day. The worse I felt inside, the better I tried to look on the outside,” she explains.

As Ms. Onfroy’s struggles deepened, challenges at work intensified, culminating in concerns about punctuality that eventually escalated into a formal memo.

“It was a general feeling of failure. My job takes up 90 per cent of my life. What I couldn’t share with them was that I was late because my brain was not allowing me to get up…. I was having mental breakdowns,” she says, admitting that she feared losing the very job she had always envisioned for herself.

As the challenges intensified, Ms. Onfroy made a deliberate decision in 2022 to take control of her situation and seek professional help.

However, accessing care proved difficult, requiring her to travel from Trelawny to Mandeville, Manchester.

“Finding a psychiatrist was a bit tedious. I didn’t feel like they were readily available for persons,” the educator notes.

The ADHD diagnosis confirmed her suspicions, but her initial reaction was one of resignation, seeing it as a dark cloud hanging over her life. Over time, however, her perspective began to shift.

“I wasn’t going to allow my diagnosis to hold me back… it was because of my diagnosis that I was going to do at least one per cent better than what I would normally do,” Ms. Onfroy says.

Driven by that mindset, she leaned on her faith as she worked to regain stability, noting that it grounded her and provided strength as she navigated the challenges of her condition.

Ms. Onfroy’s renewed focus and resilience eventually earned her recognition as Teacher of the Year for the 2024/25 academic year at Holland High School in March 2026 — a moment she described as “a sign that I had triumphed over adversity.”

Reflecting on her childhood dream of becoming a mother to “100 children,” Ms. Onfroy realised that her vision had come to life in another form — through the students she nurtured in her classroom.

Head of the English Department, Paula Bryan McIntosh, said she could not contain her excitement at Ms. Onfroy’s recognition.

“I jumped. I hugged her… this was my student, now my colleague,” she recalls, noting that Ms. Onfroy had shared she was facing challenges behind the scenes.

Ms. McIntosh explains that Ms. Onfroy’s recognition was not based solely on improvement, but on her unwavering connection with students — a bond she maintained even during her most challenging periods.

“She is very humble… and she knows her strengths and her weaknesses. One moment that stood out to me… [was when] she was conducting action research because she wanted to motivate the boys to do well,” the Department Head says.

Ms. McIntosh notes that Ms. Onfroy also worked tirelessly to ensure her students excelled, a commitment resulting in a 100 percent pass rate in Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) English.

As Ms. Onfroy reflects on her journey, she encourages other teachers to persevere and to explore the root causes of their challenges. To her students, her message is simple yet powerful: “be confident in who you are.”

“As [National Hero, the Right Excellent] Marcus Mosiah Garvey said, ‘if you have no confidence in yourself, you are twice defeated in the race of life.’ I want them to be themselves. Comfortably so as well. Be the ‘you’ that you want to see,” she adds.