Past Students Need to Support their Alma Mater – PM

Prime Minister Bruce Golding, has called on past students to continuously contribute to the schools that helped to groom them into successful adults. “No successful school is able to do well relying only on the students currently enrolled. Even after we graduate, we should never leave school,” the Prime Minister said on Wednesday (January 28) to members of the wider St George’s College (STGC) community, at the groundbreaking ceremony for a new building which will be financed solely by fund raising efforts of past students.
Congratulating the initiative, the Prime Minister said that too many students today are not achieving their full potential and that the schools need the help of past students and the Government.
“Nobody who passed through St George’s could ever fail to acknowledge the impact that it has had on them and what it has done for their lives,” the Prime Minister reminded the gathering.
Speaking about the need for Jamaica to be ready for a new world economic order, he said that many more children needed to be inspired and nurtured to achieve their full potential. “So much of our development deficit is due to the fact that we have not produced succeeding generations of competent people whose potential have been sufficiently developed to take part in the world that exists. The resources that we need are the capacity of our people to create things. We have to create out of these young minds the competence, the capacity, the determination and the drive. There are many players: the Government and the resources it has to find; the teachers who labour under difficult conditions and the past students to provide the level of support. There is no school that is able to be successful purely on the basis of the student body which is passing through”, Mr. Golding said.
The new building at St George’s will house several classrooms and be named in honour of past student and Archbishop Emeritus of Kingston, the Most Reverend Lawrence A. Burke. Archbishop Burke, who also taught Chemistry at his alma mater, led the team that financed and constructed the industrial arts building at St George’s College – the first of the traditional boys’ schools to have this facility.