Honoring our Legacy.
Investing in our Future.
Impact That
Lasts Generations.
Every computer donated. Every scholarship awarded. Every student encouraged. Every partnership formed. Every life transformed.
Since 1951 the school has shaped students. The Vaz Preparatory School Past Student Association carries that work forward — investing in students, educators, and communities, and creating opportunities that extend far beyond the classroom.
Our Impact By The Numbers
Campaign Goal
Investing Where It Matters Most
Every programme below is funded and run by Vaz Prep past students — alumni who were raised to think of others, and who give their time, their expertise and their own money to make sure the next generation gets more than they did.
Bridging the Digital Divide
250+ computers donated to Vaz Prep and 13 other schools, plus network and wireless upgrades — in partnership with FAU, Kiwanis, and Food for the Poor.
Explore the initiative →Scholarships & Bursaries
Supporting talented students so that circumstance never decides a child’s future — helping keep bright young minds in school.
Support scholarships →Robotics & STEM
Backing the next generation of problem-solvers — supporting robotics and hands-on science that turn a child’s curiosity into a career.
Back young innovators →Sports & Athletics
Track spikes, uniforms and equipment funded every single year, so that no child sits on the sideline for want of a pair of shoes.
Support our athletes →Graduation & Milestones
Graduation gifts, awards and trophies for our young people — standing beside them at the moments they will remember all their lives.
Celebrate a graduate →Teacher Appreciation & Support
Honouring the educators who shaped us — with recognition, classroom resources and the respect a life in teaching deserves.
Honour a teacher →Special Needs Partnerships
Upgrading learning spaces and resources so children with special needs have the room, the tools and the support to thrive.
Get involved →Solar Energy Initiative
Every dollar saved on power is a dollar returned to the classroom — investing in sustainable energy for the school’s future.
Fund the initiative →Fundraising & Community Outreach
A working volunteer board that meets weekly, travels to Jamaica several times a year, and raises every dollar behind the programmes on this page.
Join the effort →Powering the Next 75 Years
Meet the Future of Vaz Preparatory School
Every dollar saved on electricity is a dollar back in the classroom. The Solar Initiative is the flagship project of our 75th Anniversary Campaign — built to cut the school’s largest recurring bill permanently, and to redirect that money to scholarships, STEM education and digital transformation.
Vaz Preparatory School, Kingston — with the harbour and the city beyond.
Artist’s visualization · proposed solar arrayBridging the Digital Divide
Built at Vaz.
Shared Across Jamaica.
This room is where it began. Alumnus Lloyd Carney gave Vaz Preparatory School its first full computer lab, dedicated in honor of his father — and that lab became the blueprint for everything that followed.
It did not start in 2020. Alumna Simone Fisher Sobers began placing computers in Vaz and neighbouring schools as early as 2010, and in 2020 founded Winsome Wishes for Kids. Since 2015, VPSPSA, Winsome Wishes for Kids and individual alumni together have placed more than 500 computers, laptops and tablets in schools across Jamaica.
Five hundred devices would have been more than enough to put a computer in front of every child at Vaz. Instead, our alumni sent eight out of every ten of them outward — to schools from Kingston to St. Elizabeth.
This lab is not the finish line. It is the standard we are working to give every school on our list.
While we could have ensured every student at Vaz would have access to a computer, we were raised to think of others — that’s why we have donated more than 150 of the computers to 12 schools across Jamaica.
Peter Richardson
President, VPSPSA
Jamaica Gleaner — “A Vision for Digital Empowerment,” January 2, 2025
Speaking in January 2025, on the computers delivered through the Florida Atlantic University partnership. The alumni effort now exceeds 500 devices.
The Lloyd Carney Computer Lab at Vaz Preparatory School, Kingston.
The model we replicateHardware Is Only Half of It
A Device That Teaches a Child to Read
A computer in a classroom is a start. A computer that teaches a child to read is a programme. The tablets our alumni place arrive loaded with GraphoGame — a phonics application developed in Finland by linguists, neuropsychologists and speech pathologists, and more independently researched than any other reading game of its kind. It runs offline, so a child does not need connectivity to keep learning.
In November 2024, more than 100 GraphoGame tablets were delivered to 23 Jamaican schools — at a handover ceremony held here at Vaz Preparatory School. Vaz was also one of the three pilot schools chosen for the programme’s Jamaican rollout.
Software and teacher training delivered in partnership with Winsome Wishes for Kids, the non-profit founded by VPSPSA board member and alumna Simone Fisher Sobers. VPSPSA places the devices; Winsome Wishes for Kids puts the reading programme on them.
Support the Digital Divide InitiativeScholarships
The Power of a Scholarship
A scholarship is the smallest line in a school’s budget and the largest line in a child’s life. For seventy‑five years Vaz Preparatory School has opened its doors to children whose families could not have opened them alone — and the VPSPSA Scholarship Fund exists for one reason: so that no deserving child is turned away for the price of a place.
A Scholarship Opened the Door
Jaydon Hibbert · Scholarship Recipient
Jaydon Hibbert received a scholarship from Vaz Preparatory School. He arrived as a boy from Kingston with talent and no guarantee of a place. He left with the discipline, the coaching and the confidence that a school gives a child when it decides to invest in one.
Much of that coaching came from Coach June Cover‑Simpson, who has spent years on the field at Vaz teaching children to run, jump and compete — long before anyone knew which of them the world would eventually be watching.
What Jaydon did with that start belongs to him. In 2022 he won World Under‑20 gold in the triple jump in Cali, Colombia, with a championship record of 17.27m. In 2023 he set the world under‑20 record at 17.87m, took the NCAA indoor and outdoor triple jump titles for Arkansas, and became the youngest recipient of The Bowerman — the award given to the finest collegiate track and field athlete in the United States — in his freshman year. In 2024 he finished fourth at the Olympic Games in Paris.
A scholarship opened the door. Talent and determination did the rest.
The Coach
Thirty‑Eight Years on the Same Field
The woman standing beside Jaydon has been coaching at Vaz Preparatory School since before he was born. June Cover‑Simpson has given this school thirty‑eight years, and a remarkable number of the athletes Jamaica now knows by name — Olympians, World Cup footballers, world champions — were children on this field first, under her.
Long before she was anybody’s coach, she was a player. The Jamaica Observer calls her Jamaica’s first Reggae Girl. She turned out for the Wild Cats — the first women’s football team this country ever had — and represented Jamaica in World Cup qualifying under Winston Chung Fah, against the United States, Canada and Mexico, in an era when a Jamaican girl who played football had to invent the path she walked on.
A scholarship opens the door. Someone still has to be standing on the other side of it.
And Some of Them Come Back
Sanya Richards-Ross · Class of 1996
Sanya Richards‑Ross started at Vaz Preparatory School at the age of four. She went on to win four Olympic gold medals and to become one of the most decorated quarter‑milers in the history of the sport. She has never stopped calling Vaz hers.
She is a regular and consistent supporter of Track and Field at Vaz — through grants and through the equipment our young athletes train on. When she returns to a meet, she is not there for a photograph. She is there because the children in the picture are running on ground she helped pay for.
In 2026 she serves as Ambassador for our 75th Anniversary, carrying the school’s name into its next seventy‑five years.
Vaz gave them a start. They came back and gave it to the next child.
Give the future generations of young Jamaicans an opportunity through Vaz Prep to live their dreams in the same way I have — through the sport of track and field, and beyond.
Sanya Richards-Ross
Four‑Time Olympic Gold Medalist · Class of 1996 · Ambassador, Vaz Prep 75
Recorded for the 75th Anniversary Campaign and provided by the speaker.
A Vaz Prep scholarship helped launch a champion. Your support can help launch the next one.
Fund a ScholarshipVaz Community Engagement
Seventy‑Five Years of Showing Up.
Past students who left this school decades ago still turn out for it — on the field, at the table, and back at the gate in Kingston. This is what the association looks like when nobody is asking for money.
Wherever you are — Kingston, Florida, Toronto, London — there is a room with people from Vaz in it.
Join the AssociationStrategic Partnerships
No School Does This Alone.
A university prepares the machines. A service club clears and moves them. A classroom at Vaz is where they are handed over. Partnership is not how we supplement this work — it is how it multiplies.
Florida Atlantic University
Kiwanis Club of Jamaica
At Vaz Preparatory School
Reading software and teacher training delivered in partnership with Winsome Wishes for Kids, founded by alumna and VPSPSA board member Simone Sobers. VPSPSA places the devices; Winsome Wishes for Kids puts the reading program on them. On the Kiwanis side of the handover stands Roger Roomes — a Vaz past student and former VPSPSA board member. These partnerships are not arrangements between strangers.
If your organization moves things, funds things, teaches or builds — there is a place for you in the next seventy‑five years.
Partner With Us