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Contact:
John Emmanuel
Wednesday, April 27, 2005 - Over twenty-three (23) million dollars is to
be spent by government in the 2005/06 financial year in an attempt to give a
further boost to education on the island. The monies will go toward the
construction of two new state-of-the-art secondary schools.
The first school will be built in Massade, Gros-Islet on 8.32 acres of land and
will contain 20 classrooms, 3 science laboratories, a computer laboratory, a
learning resource centre, an art room, and segregated sick bays for male and
female students along with individual offices of the principal, vice principal,
school bursar, councillor and a 1000-person capacity auditorium.
According to Minister of Education, Human Resource Development, Youth and Sports
Hon. Mario Michel, the school will be a four-stream five-form secondary school,
designed to accommodate 700 students. The other school will be constructed in
Marigot on 10 acres of land and will boast of similar amenities but will forgo
the art room for an agricultural/science laboratory instead.
Minister Michel says the construction of the two new schools under the World
Bank funded OECS Education Development Plan (OEDP), is part of further attempts
by government at moving towards universal secondary education on the island. The
continued improvement in students’ performance at all levels of the education
system he says, represents money well spent.
As part of his contribution to the 2005/06 debate on the Appropriations Bill,
Minister Michel who is the Member of Parliament for Gros-Islet said, “The net
result of all of our effort was the continued improvement in the performance of
our students as measured by the results of both local and overseas examinations.
Again in 2004 as was the case in 2003, there was significant improvement in the
performance of our primary school students in the minimum standards test in
grade two and grade four and in the Common Entrance Exams in grade six and grade
seven.”
Secondary school students he noted, recorded an improvement in the CXC exams
with the overall pass rate in General and Technical proficiency subjects moving
from 70.63% in 2003 to 71.62% in 2004. Meantime 17 out of the 19 secondary
schools taking part in CXC obtained overall pass rates in excess of 50% with
five secondary schools obtained pass rates of over 80%.
Government’s allocation to the Ministry of Education, Human Resource Development
Youth and Sports in the 2005/06 financial year was increased by 30 million
dollars over the previous year.
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