Fifty-nine students receive scholarships

Barrington Flemming, Gleaner Writer

WESTERN BUREAU:Fifty-nine students in the East Central St James constituency were on Tuesday made beneficiaries of scholarships worth more than $5 million.

The awards were presented by the East Central St James Education and Welfare Council of Member of Parliament Edmund Bartlett at the Iberostar Resort, Montego Bay.

Bartlett, in highlighting the importance of the scholarships, indicated that the fund, which was now in its 15th year, was made possible because of the partnership of three Spanish hotels operating in Jamaica: Iberostar, Montego Bay; Gran Bahia Príncipe in St Ann; and Grand Palladium in Lucea, Hanover.

Two scholarships were presented to teachers of mathematics in the constituency as according to Bartlett, there needed to be targeted interventions in the teaching of the subject to improve student performance at the primary and secondary levels.

"Today, we present 35 tertiary scholarships to college and university students and 24 to high-school students. We will also be making presentations of educational material, including books and supplies, to many other students in the constituency prior to the start of the school year," he said.

Human resource needs

Turning his attention to the education system, Bartlett said after 51 years of Independence, the education system had failed to prepare the relevant personnel to fill the human resource needs of the economy to put it on a sound footing to realise real growth.

"We have to look to determine now how appropriate are the disciplines that we are putting forward for economic development," the MP said. "Why are we training people for disciplines for which they are not required - not in demand? Why are we ending up with more guidance counsellors than we hope for?

"There ought to be a paradigm shift in how we train people as we are not satisfying the demands of a nation intent on reaching developed status by 2030," he said.

He also lamented the fact that a vast majority of the island's high-school students continue to graduate without a single subject.

"We have to move beyond 71 per cent of students who graduate from our high schools who leave school without a single pass. We have to move beyond where 10 per cent of our children who get the GSAT (Grade Six Achievement Test) within the 80 per cent grade average manage to get into tertiary.

"At 10 per cent, we are still looking at a significantly lower percentage of those who graduate and take their place in the various disciplines that actually are in society," Bartlett said.