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From:TheBahamasWeekly.com Bahamas Information Services Updates
Nassau, The Bahamas – On September 5, 2011, the doors of to the new T. Glover Primary School welcomed over 400 students. This milestone was commemorated during an official ceremony held at the new school campus on Friday, January 27, 2012. Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Hubert Ingraham, said that he was ‘pleased’ to participate in honouring this ‘son of Inagua.’ “Theodore Grant Glover, a son of Inagua, was what we might call a natural-born teacher. He began his teaching career as a Monitor, at the age of 12. He came to be known and regarded as a dedicated educator committed to the development of the whole child. He taught during a period in our history when respect for authority and the value of obtaining a good education was of paramount importance.” Mr. Ingraham added that due to the school’s large campus and small number of students, he would await recommendations from the Department of Education to ‘populate’ the school with more children. “I note that the opening of this school permits us to close the Naomi Blatch Primary School which will, like Willard Patton, become a pre-school for four- year-old children. It is possible that those recommendations could propose the amalgamation of the Mable Walker Primary School with T.G. Glover and the conversion of Mable Walker into another pre-school for four-year-old children. This would necessarily involve the busing of children from the catchment area of the Mable Walker School.” Comparing Mr. Glover to the character (Mark Thackery) played by Bahamian actor Sir Sidney Poitier in the l967 film ‘To Sir, with Love’, Minister of Education, Hon. T. Desmond Bannister, said that T. G. Glover took an active role in the lives of his students by ‘influencing’ them for the better.
“He visited their homes in order to establish a good rapport with their parents, no doubt fostering better opportunities for parental involvement.” Also present was Minister of Works, the Hon. Neko Grant who gave an overview of the construction of the school. “This school features an attractive and very unique design which highlights the unusual topography of the land on which it is built,” said Mr. Grant. “ The school is a concrete reinforced structure of approximately 73,000 square feet, with a covered pedestrian mall/stairway area that connects the structure’s two levels. For almost 50 years, the late T. G. Glover dedicated his life to education, serving as teacher and headmaster in a number of schools and as an administrator at the Board of Education, which subsequently became the Ministry of Education. Mr. Glover retired in l972. He and his wife, Lillith had eight children. T. G. Glover died on September 5, l982. The first institution named for Mr. T.G. Glover was a junior high school. Subsequently, with the closure of a number of small primary schools the name T.G. Glover was attached to a primary school. Then during the 1990s, several schools were amalgamated in order to upgrade and expand inner city primary schools like the Woodcock and Albury Sayles Primary Schools, which were made like new, and converted the Willard Patton into a preschool for four-year-olds. The poorly constructed T.G. Glover School was closed and its administrative and teaching staff and students temporarily dispersed to different school campuses. Construction commenced in October 2006 and was to have been completed in March 2009 at a cost of some $10 million but due to several issues and changes, the school was built at a cost of some $16 million. The current school population consists 460 students (including students from the separate campuses and 93 students of Naomi Blatch Primary School; seven administrators; 24 special teacher; 24 generalist teachers, three clerical workers; four janitresses and four security officers. The school also has three Pre-school units and a Special Education Unit.
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