2600 High School Students Soon to Benefit from Free Education Program

Dian Maheia

C.E.O. Maheia also gave an update on the ministry’s free education program. At the start of the 2022 school year, four high schools on the south side of Belize City benefited from the pro-poor program.  In mid-March, Prime Minister John Briceño announced that students in Toledo and Stann Creek Districts will also benefit from the free education program. Today, C.E.O. Maheia says that when the rollout commences in southern Belize, approximately two thousand, six hundred high school students, which is about twelve percent, will be engaged in the next academic year.

Dian Maheia, C.E.O., Ministry of Education

“We are looking at an expansion of five more schools in the south and that expansion is going to reach a target of one thousand six hundred more students. So remember, this first pilot project with the four schools that we are doing in Belize City, the goal has always been to reach one thousand students and we are just shy of that goal. We are at, between nine-fifty and a thousand who have registered and consistently attended school – because of course attendance is always something to monitor. But we are looking at one thousand for Belize City and now with the rollout and the five schools that we are adding, we are targeting another sixteen hundred students. And if you considered the fact that we have some twenty-two thousand students more or less in high school what you are looking at is that with these nine schools we are going to be touching two thousand six hundred students and helping them to get to school and to stay in school.”