Much progress made in education sector

Dear Editor,

From recent developments around the country, it is quite evident that the government is serious about equipping the nation’s children for the working world. In this regard, the government has made several interventions as part of its efforts to enhance school attendance throughout the country. This effort is not limited to coastal areas alone, but rather the entire country.

The interventions come in different forms from time to time and are meant to prevent parents and children from coming up with excuses for children not attending schools. Apart from the school feeding programme which has already been extended to several schools, every schoolchild at the nursery, primary and secondary levels is given a uniform voucher for Gy$1500.

Editor, I am sure many of your readers would agree that things have changed dramatically and the current government is making sure everything is put in place to make school children comfortable while they learn. For example, scores of new school buildings have been constructed all over the country, and more trained teachers are churned out by the training institutions to better equip them for their classroom encounters. This is manifest in the results of the recent Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations which have produced scores of top students and overall satisfactory results.

It is clear that the government’s intention is to ensure that children of school age from every inch of Guyana’s soil must attend school on a regular basis. For this reason, it is providing all the prerequisites that would suffice for a child’s presence in school.

In Guyana, it is not an easy task reaching out to all the children. The country has been banded into ten administrative regions with each region receiving its own subvention from central government to enhance the standard of living of its people. While the regions that run along the coastline are easier to access, school children in outlying regions are given milk and biscuits on the traditional school feeding programme.

Region Nine forms part of our border with Brazil and is made up of some 45 villages. But because of logistics, it is difficult to implement the traditional school feeding programme there. The government has, however, been able to substitute the method of school feeding for Region Nine children with the traditional cassava bread and peanut butter.

The administration has been very instrumental in encouraging the setting up of cottage industries in the region. At the moment, seven cottage industries are producing peanut butter for the school feeding programme.

These cottage industries are able to supply the schools while they still have supplies for their traditional markets.

Editor, I believe that Region Nine is a perfect example of how other regions in the country could assist in their own little way in enhancing their own living standards, and at the same time help in their children’s education.

Sincerely,

Rudy Sinclair