Some of the earliest efforts of the repatriates to provide education for their children can be traced back to early home schooling efforts. Such an attempt is recorded in the year 1975, when Brother Donald Leach started home schooling in his humble home with 6 infant children. The need of the newly arrived English-speaking repatriates to provide the basics of education to their children, birthed in this remote non-English-speaking environment, compelled Brother Leach and his wife Yvonne, from Kingston, Jamaica, into homeschooling their own children and other children in their community.
In the early 1980s, Karl Hamilton, a Jamaican by birth and graduate of Adelphi University in New York, was repatriated to Ethiopia by the TTI New York chapter and soon assumed and upgraded these home schooling efforts by using his own premises, conduction classes under a shady tree, with the children sitting on flat stones and make-shift wooden benches.
In the late 1990s Albert “Teach” Allen from Jamaica repatriated to Ethiopia and with the support of brethren in the Diaspora, advanced this educational process into a more formal school structure with 15 students. He was allowed by The Twelve Tribes Of Israel organization In Shashamane to locate the operation in a 15’ X 30’ zinc shed on its headquarters compound.
In 1991 Allen was permitted to relocate the school on a portion of a three acre land, bequeathed by two former settlers, Dean Dan and Chris Dan to Sis Joan Douglas, a longstanding community resident. Mr. Allen was assisted by Mrs. Janet McLaughlin, Yoseph Leach, and a native Ethiopian, Teacher Bruck.
With the formal registration and inauguration of the Jamaican Rastafarian Development Community (JRDC ) in 2002, these teachers and founders, themselves JRDC Community members, agreed to register the school as the Jamaica Rastafarian Development Community school and became salaried staff members under the auspices of The JRDC Board.
This became the first phase of the government-approved NGO education project, which lists the U.S. based Shashamane Foundation as primary overseas sponsor and partner.
With ongoing funding and oversight from the U.S based Shashamane Foundation and other well-wishers, an initial donation from Patrick Spence, and the vigilance of a the JRDC board and good Managing Directors the school developed successfully year by year overcoming many challenges.
25years to date there is now a modern 2 floor level concrete elementary school building with 8 Classrooms rooms, a recently built 4 room Kindergarten Facility with a separate dining room for students, a stand-alone administrative office, a small library, a computer room, a 1-room art building, and modern concrete sanitary facilities for boys and girls; all housed on the same 3-acre plot of land.
There is currently a registered school population of 430 students and 29 members of Staff. To date over 2000 students have gradated from this school to higher institutions of learning, including Universities in Hawasa and Bahadar and owning businesses in their communities being gainfully employed in private and government sectors in Shashamane and elsewhere.