The Spiritual Baptist Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Centre will officially open on Spiritual Baptist Liberation Day today, says Archbishop Barbara Gray-Burke.The religious sect is also set to open a secondary school, budgeted for by the Government, Gray-Burke revealed in an interview with the Sunday Guardian last week.Gray-Burke (who sits on the Council of Elders of Spiritual Baptists of T&T) said in approximately one month, the sect would locate land on which to construct the faith-based secondary school.
The sect in 2012 formerly opened its first school, a primary school at a cost of $29 million. The primary school was built on land in Maloney, given to the Spiritual Baptists by the Basdeo Panday administration.As an opposition senator under the United National Congress, Gray-Burke lobbied for the construction of the school as well as for a national holiday. She said she will like to have schools throughout T&T since education was a vehicle through which people could move out of poverty.
"We would like to have a school in every city, town and village. Education would take each one out of poverty," she said.The Spiritual Baptist/Shouter Liberation Day was granted in 1996 in commemoration of the 1951 repeal of the 1917 Shouter Prohibition Ordinance. The holiday is observed each year on March 30.Gray-Burke said the religion had spread to other parts of the world such as Canada, the US and other Caribbean islands.