The building constructed in 1953 to serve as the Official Residence of the Principal of the then Valley Secondary School, later as the Department of Lands and Surveys and eventually as the Education Department until recently, is being dismantled.

The Education Department in The Valley

It will now be giving way to a modern office complex for the Education Department, a project of the Ministry of Education. The new two storey building will house all of the staff of the Education Department except those involved in curriculum development.

The Curriculum Unit will be housed upstairs the Public Library. The plan is to have the two storey complex connected to the Teachers Resource Centre, upstairs, so that persons can move between the two buildings via bridge rather than coming downstairs.

The complex will take up all of the space currently occupied by the Arts and Crafts Shop (which will be demolished) and which has already been relocated. Later on, Government will provide land and building for the National Council of Women for their new Arts and Crafts Shop.

Construction of the education complex should commence in the last quarter of 2008. Funds amounting to 1.6 million dollars have already been approved and additional money will be provided in the next financial year. “We have looked at the preliminary plans from the Department of Infrastructure and are awaiting the final drawings and the tendering process,” Mr. Rey told The Anguillian.

He went on: “We are a little slow in getting off the ground with many of our projects we have approved for the year. One of them is the construction of a new classroom facility for Electronics and Electricity at the Albena Lake-Hodge Comprehensive School. Sometime last year we discontinued classes in the Home Economics Block. That is the building nearest the Ronald Webster Park. It will be demolished because the construction was inferior and unsafe. We made a decision with the Ministry of Infrastructure to close it down and to demolish it and on that site, before the next school year, we will start to build a modern classroom facility for Electronics and Electricity.

“We have a teacher coming back home from the United States where she is completing her degree programme and we will need to provide her and the students with a modern classroom. The young teacher is Miss Eva Hodge of The Valley and this is one of the areas of technical education we need to pay attention to in terms of the requirements of the labour force.”

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