Highschoolers to receive scholarships for tutoring

And while officials are taking care of the textbooks, across the country, parents and students are beginning to make their own back to school preparations. But there’s good news for highschoolers in Belize City tonight as a new programme will see a number of third and fourth formers become trained tutors in exchange for one year full scholarships. According to coordinator Peter Lacey, over the next week, fifty secondary school students will be selected to teach two hundred and fifty underprivileged children.

Peter Lacey, Tutoring Programme Coordinator
“These students will be divided into fifty groups of five and every five students will have a tutor. These tutors will receive a one year scholarships: books, tuition and fees paid by the Ministry of Education and in return, they will be tutoring the kids four days a week, two hours a day.

Janelle Chanona
“So it’s a cycle then, you teach a younger person and in return you get something for your efforts.”

Peter Lacey
“Yes, basically what we are promoting is the well rounded student. There are a lot of intelligent students out there with some incredible grades and grade point averages, but they are not really well rounded. What we are promoting is well rounded, mature students, who are out there actually doing community work, and this scholarship here is for students that are like that; it’s a community service.”

“We will work with the seventeen primary schools that we will be dealing with the students and we’ll be having attendance records. These students will be trained by the Quality Assurance Development Services, so it is a system as you said. They will be trained, required to come in a few times, probably once a month to review their tutoring skills and like that and we will monitor that everybody gets in on time at the tutoring.”

Students interested in participating in the Scholarship for Tutoring programme can pick up application forms at the Ministry of Education office on North Front Street. Deadline for submission is Friday, August seventeenth.