B.T.L. awards 14 high school scholarships

It’s the time of year when concerned parents are scraping hard to find money for school books, fees, uniforms and all the other seemingly endless expenses of education. But for over a dozen lucky Belizean families, for the next four years school money is not going to be a problem.

Forrest Phillips, 2006 B.T.L. Scholarship Recipient
?I knew that I did very well in the P.S.E., but I think it was up to the scholarship committee to make a decision.?

Jacqueline Godwin, Reporting
Thirteen year old Forrest Phillips is one of the fourteen primary school graduates who will be attending a high school of their choice at no major costs to their families … thanks to the B.T.L.?s high school scholarship programme.

Christine Staine, Mother
?I was happy. I felt truly grateful, because right now it?s really challenging in terms of paying the school fees and buying books. I was truly happy, and very proud of my daughter.?

Since the programme started fifteen years ago over three hundred students have benefited. The 2006 recipients were chosen out of a total of two hundred and fifty applicants. The young men and women will now join fifty-nine other scholarship students who are presently enrolled in high schools across the country.

Dean Boyce, Chairman, B.T.L. Executive Committee
?This has been a very big programme. It?s a very high profile programme, a lot of people, students would like to be a part of the programme, and the fourteen, therefore, that were selected have done extremely well to get to this stage. So I would just like to say congratulations to you all.?

Minister of Education, Francis Fonseca, applauded the investment made by B.T.L. in the children of Belize and noted that the people of Belize have also been contributing to a tune of one hundred and twenty million dollars a year in the education of students of all ages.

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
?So it is a tremendous investment we have made as a people. It is very, very costly, education is not cheap. But as many others have said, try ignorance. It is a worthwhile investment and we have to keep working to ensure that we get value for that investment.?

?We have about sixty-two thousand of these students, like these young students here, at the primary school level. We have about sixteen thousand students in secondary school and about seven thousand students at the sixth form and university level, the University of Belize.?

The awardees were encouraged to remain confident and do well as they now embark on a higher level of education.

B.T.L. says that they spend over fifty thousand dollars each year on the scholarship programme.