TEETHING PAINS Mount Pleasant getting by despite construction constraints
Principal of the newly established Mount Pleasant Football Academy Vanny Clarke said that the first week of school has been challenging due to what he describes as “minor teething pains”. But he says all this was anticipated based on their “aggressive timeline” to becoming fully operational.
However, contingency plans were in place to reduce the impact, and he is quite satisfied with how things went in the first week.
“It’s been amazing. With any new project there are inevitable teething pains, and considering the aggressive timeline we ran on the construction, we have some issues,” he admitted.
“The week was really hectic. There are minor issues, but nothing that cannot be, and has not been addressed,” he added.
The school is still working on the plumbing system, medical facilities and technological systems, while the dining room and kitchen is near completion, and the football fields are awaiting a new contractor. But Clarke said that these minor setbacks were anticipated.
HIDDEN CURRICULUM
“The hidden curriculum has been affected. The canteen isn’t complete and it has impacted the message of etiquette and dining-room manners. They (the students) have been eating on the main building, and that has posed a challenge as the kitchen staff is in a crammed space, and we have scaled down on the quantity of our orders because of storage space,” he disclosed.
The playing fields are also not ready because Brandon Murray, who was responsible for the field, passed away this year. Further issues exist where more hardware equipment is needed and IT infrastructure is incomplete.
“We still truck water daily. We have two fields of our own, but we want a slightly better surface, We are using two playing fields in Discovery Bay and have to bus the boys to training,” he said.
But the challenges haven’t caused much disruption for school.
“They (issues) haven’t caused much disruption in operational protocol we put in place. We saw this coming and we had the contingency [plan], but it has added to our overhead [cost],” he said.
All outstanding projects should be finished by November. “The canteen will be finished by the end of September or first week in October. It’s very close,” he said.
“We will have the playing field by late November. Our medical facility, we expected on stream between March and April next year. We have hardware equipment to bring in and IT infrastructure to complete, and I expect that to be finished by October so the entire property can be covered by wireless and wired Internet,” he continued.
“But those thing will not impact the overall long-term objectives. We should be operating at full capacity by the time the playing fields are finished in midNovember. So, once we complete construction on phase one, we will look into phase two, and we expect that to come on stream between March and April next year,” he added.