Raymon Treasure – Decorated Principal of York Castle High School

A good educator is one who seeks to improve the lives of future generations through deliberate actions in their daily work.

This can be said of nation-builder and 2022 Prime Minister’s Medal of Appreciation for Service to Education awardee, Raymon Treasure, who was among 80 recipients honoured in September.

 

The decorated Principal of York Castle High School in St. Ann, who has received awards for leadership from the Jamaica Teaching Council and the St. Ann Chamber of Commerce, among other organisations, says the Medal of Appreciation is a different level of accomplishment.

“At the local level, people are always going to say you are doing a good [deed]. But to be recognised at the national level tells you that you are making an impact nationally. It felt as if my accomplishments were recognised at the highest level [and] to have been numbered among that illustrious group was a great feeling,” Mr. Treasure tells JIS News.

He believes his strength lies in his capacity to develop programmes in response to the needs of young people and the economy around him.

Since entering the field of education in 1991, Mr. Treasure has focused on spurring significant improvements to the institutions and young lives with which he has been associated.

The teacher-turned-administrator, started as a Politics and Government and History lecturer at Brown’s Town Community College in St. Ann.

He later became the Director of the institution’s Technical Campus, an arm of the College he conceptualised and helped to establish on the site of the old Kaiser Bauxite Company administrative offices in Discovery Bay, St. Ann, in 2001.

“There was the need for people in the technical areas of engineering, construction, telecommunications, and we would have approached Noranda Bauxite, which was Kaiser at the time, for use of the building which was just there. I prepared the proposal to offer technical programmes and spent about seven years as its director,” says Mr. Treasure.

With the high demand for technical programmes certified by City and Guilds and the Council of Community Colleges of Jamaica, Mr. Treasure was instrumental in guiding thousands of students in their areas of interest through the technical programmes and moreso as a lecturer.

“On two occasions, while there as Director, we had a student being placed first in the world in City and Guilds Construction and then Engineering. We were supplying the world with workers for industry from there,” he points out.

In 2007, Mr. Treasure got the opportunity to mould minds of a younger cohort of students and improve the conditions at another educational institution, when he was appointed York Castle High School’s Principal.

He shares that the move required adjustments to his approach to administration, as no longer was he interfacing with adults and young adults, but, rather, was responsible for guiding the lives of teenaged boys and girls.

“As a high-school principal, you have to zoom in on everything. A college principal is really there to deliver a curricula while a high-school principal is there to deliver both the academic and co-curricula, and the hidden curricula too. So, it was hard work when I came [to York Castle],” Mr. Treasure tells JIS News.

The administrator shares that, as York Castle’s eighth Principal, his goals were to enhance the educational programmes and position the school to recapture its place among Jamaica’s premier co-educational secondary institutions.

“The aim was to restore our pride, our standards and our academic performance. We had to also put in co-curricular programmes that would make us attractive, so that people could have a better view of York Castle as a school. We had to rebrand and create a York Castle… [to which] people would want to send their children,” he explains.

To this end, Mr. Treasure embarked on rolling out a nationally recognised sixth-form programme and improving both the school’s educational offering and attractiveness to new students and parents alike.

He rallied his new team of educators and administrators at the institution, inspired students and staff alike to improve the school’s ranking from the mid-30s to being in the top 15 schools in 2017, based on Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) passes.

York Castle’s sixth-form programme, which officially commenced in 2014, not only saw them retaining the best students for an additional two years but attracting the top-performing youngsters from surrounding schools such as St. Hilda’s Diocesan and Westwood High Schools.

This increased student competitiveness elevated York Castle’s profile and, ultimately, curbed the tendency of high-school students leaving St. Ann to meet their educational needs.

Mr. Treasure says constant reaffirmation of the students and reminders that they are among the best and brightest in the Caribbean changed their mindset, resulting in better academic outputs. Students became more attuned to embodying the ‘Yorkist’ spirit.

The school now boasts approximately 1,400 enrolled students and has increased its CSEC subject offerings from just above 20 to 32 subject areas. These include animation and augmented reality, digital media, mechanical engineering, and economics.

The school has also produced several top regional candidates in the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE) and Jamaica’s 2021 Rhodes Scholar.

In 2018 both York Castle High and its neighbour, the Brown’s Town High School, were facing challenges recruiting teachers for specific subject areas.

The perennial innovator, Raymon Treasure, identified collaboration as the solution and made a proposal, hinged on the advantages of the shift system at Brown’s Town High.

“It was easy for me to say that ‘if I can’t find a teacher for Visual Arts or Building Technology it would be easy to reach out to Brown’s Town High and ask to use their teachers in the morning or in the afternoon’, and they do the same. If they can’t find a Physics or English teacher, they will reach out to York Castle teachers who will finish at 2:45 p.m. but can go to 5:00 p.m,” he shares.

Comparably, just ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Treasure began preparing his teachers for the digital modality of education by encouraging the use of mobile devices and online solutions such as Google Classroom and Moodle. He even went as far as training teachers in the use of online/digital tools.

“Once the pandemic came on, we were in a much better position than many schools because the students were used to it and we were encouraging teachers to do online tests and to put notes in the online space; so, we were in our comfort zone. All we did was expand the modalities available so that students could have more enriching experiences,” he adds.

Mr. Treasure was pivotal in the school now partnering with the Mount Pleasant Football Academy to afford York Castle access to some of the best footballers in the country.

The partnership facilitates access by the Academy’s youngsters to the school’s sixth-form and lower school academic programmes.

He shares that the school is also partnering with tertiary institutions, such as the Delaware State University, which allows students to commence associate degree programmes in Jamaica and complete degrees at the American college in areas such as aviation management and the sciences.

A similar partnership exists with the Caribbean Maritime University in response to students’ desire to pursue tertiary education early.

Mr. Treasure points out that his “supportive staff” also played a role in the accomplishments recorded under his tenure as “they, too, want to come up with new ideas and new programmes” for the students’ betterment and self-actualisation.