A brief history of St Joseph’s School

St Joseph’s School for the Hearing Impaired was established in 1979, by the Sisters of Cluny, a group of nuns working in Makeni.

The school started out with just eight students and two teachers. In 1986, the school accepted its first boarders, initially taking just 15 girls and 20 boys.

Sierra Leone’s civil war broke out in 1991 and lasted for a decade. Despite violence in other parts of the country, the school was largely able to carry on as usual until 1998, when rebels came to Makeni. As the fighting approached, school was cancelled; boarding students left to live with their families and administrators fled to Freetown. The abandoned school building was ransacked and destroyed by the rebels.

The UN later took over the building, using it to house peacekeepers and to store equipment.

Violence in Sierra Leone finally subsided with the signing of the Lome peace agreement in 2001. Shortly after, St Joseph’s leaders returned from Freetown and began the slow process of rebuilding the school. St Joseph’s continued to expand, taking on more students and staff and continuing to provide its teachers with specialist training. The school also began to provide vocational training alongside a more academic curriculum.

As well as providing education for over 250 pupils, and building a vibrant and thriving community for children who are hearing impaired, the school has always been a hub for audiology and improving special educational provision across the country. A number of teachers have taken their diploma in Special Education at the University of Makeni, supported by Sister Mary, who was both head of the special education programme and director of St Joseph’s school.

In order to fund the increasing demand for places and the needs of the pupils, the school opened a guesthouse, invested in farmland, and began to run a number of sustainable income generation programmes, ranging from carpentry to tailoring, and the provision of conference facilities. These schemes were all developed not only to provide income for the school, but to enable pupils to take part in certified vocational training programmes.

In 2014, Sierra Leone was devastated by the Ebola epidemic. The school was forced to close, and staff and pupils were impacted not only by the disease itself, but the ongoing economic shock for the whole country.

The Sisters of Cluny and the school community were able to act as a hub for distributing food, medical supplies and soap to people throughout Makeni and to pupils and their families in quarantine.

You can read more about this difficult time, and how the school was able to support communities, here.

In 2015, the school reopened, with various measures in place to reduce risk for staff and pupils, and in March 2016, the epidemic was declared to be over by the WHO.

Today, the school’s headteacher is Sister Amala, who is supported by a dedicated team of admin staff and teachers, as well as a number of donors and funders. St. Joseph’s has the only audiology laboratory in Sierra Leone with a qualified audiologist. The school community works tirelessly to provide the best possible opportunities for the 255 pupils, aged from 5 to 20, who attend the school.