By SANCHESKA BROWN

Tribune Staff Reporter

sbrown@tribunemedia.net

AFTER being displaced by a fire nearly eight months ago, students and teachers of the Sea Horse Institute finally have a building they can call their own.

Last December, a fire ripped through the special needs school on Shirley Street and Lake View Drive, destroying classrooms and leaving 25 students without a place to continue their education.

Since then, Dr Michelle Major, Director of the Institute, said securing a new home was a top priority as the school was operating from St Andrew’s Presbyterian Kirk.

Dr Major said her prayers were answered by Mark Roberts and his FYP Builders Mall. Mr Roberts had got a private lender interested in purchasing a property just north of Prince Charles Drive for use by the school.

“We are very excited, very, very happy as you can imagine. Our real-estate agent introduced us to this building and we fell in love. At that time though it was available for purchase and we didn’t have any means to purchase so we were looking for a rental property. Then, like by fate, we were blessed when we were introduced to Mark Roberts, who was our angel and willing to support the cause. He understood how important we are to the community and the difference that we made and gave us a mortgage so we could get this property – without him we couldn’t do that. None of this would be possible.”

Mr Roberts said it was important for FYP to help the school because of the great work Dr Major has done in the community.

“I think that it is important for a community to have a school that can take care of children that have autism.” he said. “I had first hand experience with a very close friend of mine who had a child with autism who wasn’t having much success in the regular school system. The child was getting kickback and being called disruptive, unruly, retarded, I mean there were a lot of things that was going around and it turns out that the child had autism and as soon as the child got involved with Mrs Major – four years later he was at boarding school in the United States. So I think that it is really important for us to understand it as a community, it is not something to be ashamed of and it must be addressed effectively and Mrs Major is one of the leaders in the autism field globally,” he said.

“I have secured the financing, through a private donor that trusts me with their money and she goes ‘Mark, I think this is an important campaign you are working on’. So in addition to that FYP will be donating building materials and supplying labour. We will also be supplying the tile, through Tile King.”

Dr Major said despite getting the loan the school is not completely out of the dark, as the mortgage is higher than its capacity to pay it back. So she is looking for corporate sponsors and members of the community to assist in any way possible.

  “We still have to pay it back ,with interest,” she said. “So in reality the mortgage cost and loan is more than we can afford. So in order for us to survive here we will need to lower that mortgage cost, it is more than we can afford to pay. So the overhead is more than we can afford to pay so we really need to go on a campaign now to ask the community to help us to lower that mortgage so we can stay under this roof. We need the community’s support. The quality of education and intensity of education that we provide here is so beneficial for the community. We want the public to help us in anyway that is possible. We can use anything from volunteers to $1 to $400,000. No gift or support is too small.”

The Seahorse Institute is a non-profit division of the Caribbean Centre for Child Development, which provides programmes for students, ages 18 months to adulthood with Autism, and related developmental delays such as Down’s Syndrome.