Bank funds education for primary school students

Stay in school: it’s the advice given to most students, but in numerous cases the reality is that many students are academically strong and motivated, but are held back by financial constraints. And after a 2006 report from UNICEF revealed that a high percentage of students in the Jewel don’t even make it through primary school, the Scotiabank Belize Education Fund was established. For the past four years, the bank has been rewarding outstanding students who can’t afford school expenses, with education grants. Twenty primary school students from the Belize District collected their cheques today at the Scotiabank Albert Street Branch and News Five was there for presentations.

Josie Andrews, Marketing Manager, Scotiabank
“Each grant is about three hundred dollars and the funds go towards tuition, books; any kind of other school fees that they may have. So today here at our Belize City branch we just finished presenting the twenty education grants for the students that were selected within this area here. It’s our staff and their fundraising that really keeps the foundation alive. And each year they go ahead and they do their fundraising and contribute towards the account and when the applications do go out and come back in from the different schools, they form their own committees and they go through the applications and they are the ones who do the actual selecting. So in certain instances, some branches have even managed to get some more money into it so they can give more than how much they were actually assigned to give per district. They give them applications which ask about the financial status of the parents because we want to give it to people who are having a little bit of a rough time making the actual payments themselves but at the same time looking at students who have that drive and that commitment to doing well in school.”

Branches countrywide will present a total of sixty-five to seventy grants throughout this week.