Phelisa Ricketts graduated with eight distinctions, earned a scholarship to teachers college, and built Western STEM Academy from a pandemic firing and a JMD $5,000 monthly salary. The Caribbean education system still hasn’t caught up with what she is building.
Key Takeaways
- The Teacher Who Changed Everything Before Ricketts Knew What She Was Building Toward
- Ricketts Was Fired During the Pandemic on June 30, 2020. She Launched Western STEM Academy the Next Day.
- Getting Ministry of Education Approval for an Online School in Jamaica Was Hard. She Is Keeping the Details Political.
- Western STEM Academy Is Not-for-Profit, Runs on Tuition Only, and Is Teaching Six-Year-Olds About AI Ethics
- Ricketts Is Now Building Toward Regional Expansion, Government Partnerships, and a Caribbean Curriculum for the Future
- Ricketts Has One Thing to Say to the Child in Jamaica Who Has Run Out of Reasons to Believe
- Phelisa Ricketts was placed in a girls’ home at fourteen, almost became a high school dropout at fifteen, and graduated from Westwood High School with eight grade one distinctions at CSEC — largely because one teacher decided she was worth showing up for.
- She launched Western STEM Academy on July 1, 2020, one day after being fired from a private school during the pandemic, starting with online chemistry, physics, and biology classes on Instagram.
- Western STEM is Jamaica’s first online STEM school, a fully not-for-profit institution serving students aged 6 to 18 across Jamaica and internationally, built entirely on tuition revenue with no government or private funding.
Her mother was on the streets near her school.
Not figuratively. Literally outside the gates, asking her classmates’ parents for five dollars, for one dollar. A woman with a mental illness she could not control, in the only place her body knew to go.
And inside the school, her daughter was trying to focus on class.
Schoolmates had a name for her.
“They would tease me and say, you’re Mad Pauline’s daughter. And it would just be hard.”
Phelisa Ricketts was fifteen years old. She had no money for lunch. Her grandmother sold onions and yams in the market and some days nothing sold. But one thing remained constant throughout all of it: the academics. She was, in her own words, naturally gifted. The classroom was the one place that made sense.
She graduated from Westwood High School with eight grade one distinctions at CSEC.
She earned a scholarship to Church Teachers College.
She represented Jamaica in international debating tournaments.
At twenty-three years old, she founded her own school.
The Teacher Who Changed Everything Before Ricketts Knew What She Was Building Toward
Before the school, before the distinctions, before any of this, there was Miss Winsom Lawson.
Phelisa was placed in a girls’ home at fourteen after a period she describes simply as searching for something — love, attention, identity — in places a teenager should not have been looking. From the home, she could not attend Westwood High School. That was the moment that clarified everything.
“I worked very hard for that dream. For one thing that I did at 14 to cause my whole life to almost cut off. Where now I’m in a girls’ home. I can’t go to school. I realized I can’t continue down this path.”
Miss Winsom Lawson was a teacher at Westwood who decided that a troubled fourteen-year-old girl was worth showing up for consistently, without recognition, on a teacher’s salary. She gave Phelisa money for food. Money for uniforms. Money for every small thing that stood between her and the classroom.
“She literally took me on as that mom figure. I’m looking back now thinking about what a teacher’s salary is like and wondering how she was able to provide for so many people.”
Western STEM Academy exists because of that decision. That is not a metaphor. It is the through line of everything Phelisa Ricketts has built.
Ricketts Was Fired During the Pandemic on June 30, 2020. She Launched Western STEM Academy the Next Day.
She graduated from Church Teachers College, entered the profession she had trained for, and ran into the reality of working in Jamaica’s education system as a young teacher with ideas that threatened people with more tenure and less ambition.
She moved schools. The same pattern followed.
Then she was fired.
The letter said they would not need her after June 30, 2020. The pandemic had shut down the world. Nobody was hiring. She had bills to pay.
“Getting that letter was the push to say, you gotta do something.”
July 1, 2020, she opened an Instagram page and announced she was offering online chemistry, physics, and biology classes. She was a qualified teacher with no business experience and no capital. What she had was the ability to teach and a pandemic that had shut down every government school in Jamaica.
Parents came. The summer school filled up. By September, schools were still closed and parents were asking: can you do this for the whole term?
She said yes.
She paid herself JMD $5,000 (About USD 32) a month while paying her teachers more.
“You have to invest in your business if you want it to grow. You gotta pay yourself, but you have to invest.”
Getting Ministry of Education Approval for an Online School in Jamaica Was Hard. She Is Keeping the Details Political.
Phelisa declines to go into full detail about the Ministry of Education approval process publicly. What she will say is that it was very, very hard, that an online school was a novel concept in Jamaica at the time, and that one of the requirements was a physical location.
She rented office space in Falmouth, Trelawney to satisfy the requirement — at a cost of up to half a million Jamaican dollars just for the space needed to qualify.
In 2022, she opened a physical campus in Falmouth. The first international STEM school in Trelawney. The first of its kind in Jamaica. The media came. Speakers came. She made it a celebration.
She closed it in 2024 after the rapid growth stretched her team and resources beyond what the infrastructure could hold. The school went from seven students to fourteen to twenty-eight to a hundred and fifty. A team of five or seven teachers could not keep pace with the demand. It was one of the toughest decisions she has made as a founder.
Most of her students were online anyway. Western STEM went back to what it had always been best at.
Western STEM Academy Is Not-for-Profit, Runs on Tuition Only, and Is Teaching Six-Year-Olds About AI Ethics
Western STEM Academy is a fully online, not-for-profit institution. It receives no government funding and no private investment. Every dollar from tuition goes back into running the school. Teacher salaries. Platform costs. Professional development.
The model is simple because it has to be. There is no alternative.
Students range from six to eighteen years old. The curriculum is STEM-focused, with AI literacy integrated at every level. Six-year-olds at Western STEM are learning not just what AI is but how to use it ethically, how to remain the thinker and not let the tool do the thinking for them.
“Students are not shying away from AI. But we have to teach them that you don’t want to just use it to replace your thinking. You want to remain ahead of AI.”
Teachers function as facilitators, not just instructors. The knowledge moves in both directions.
Phelisa has personally given scholarships to students who are excelling but cannot afford the fees. She does not publicize them.
“I relate to that because I was a struggling student. I have a soft heart.”
Ricketts Is Now Building Toward Regional Expansion, Government Partnerships, and a Caribbean Curriculum for the Future
Western STEM Academy’s five-year plan includes expansion across the Caribbean and into the United States and Canada, where Phelisa already has some students enrolled. The school has students in the UK.
Beyond the student-facing work, the plan includes training other schools and working with government ministries of education across the region to embed STEM and AI into national curricula. Western STEM has already done teacher training and school training programmes in Jamaica.
“A Caribbean education system preparing students for the future economy needs to apply what students are learning to real life. Teach financial literacy from grade one. Teach them how to start a business. Not only how to become an employee.”
She is currently completing her MBA. She runs the school, a business coaching practice, and a marketing agency simultaneously — though the marketing agency is paused while her daughter, who turns eight months old the day of this interview, takes priority.
She is not trying to balance any of it.
“It’s not balance. I’m just giving my best to what needs me most right now.”
Ricketts Has One Thing to Say to the Child in Jamaica Who Has Run Out of Reasons to Believe
Western STEM Academy exists because Miss Winsom Lawson once decided that a fourteen-year-old girl in a girls’ home was worth feeding, clothing, and believing in.
Phelisa Ricketts has not forgotten it. The scholarships she gives quietly, the students she tells yes to when the finances say no, the school she kept running through every hard season — all of it traces back to a classroom at Westwood and a teacher who showed up when nobody required her to.
“It’s not where you’re coming from. It’s not even where you are right now that matters. It’s where you are going. Once you think it, no matter how difficult or impossible your dream feels, it is very, very possible.”
She is speaking to the child sitting in class right now, hungry, without money for a uniform, watching her mother beg outside the gates.
She is speaking from experience.
Listen the full conversation on the Foundpreneur Podcast: Spotify Apple YouTube
Western STEM Academy: Instagram @WesternSTEM_Academy | WhatsApp or call: 571-484-9379
Follow Phelisa Ricketts on Instagram: @Phelisa_Ricketts
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Stephen Stanberry
