Jaquan Greaves receives his special award from Acting Senior Education Officer, Fernando Carter.
While being recognised for their work over the past four weeks, students who completed the national summer school programme at the Ellerslie Secondary today were told only they could determine their success.
The advice came from both education officials and facilitators who tutored the close to 60 students in English, Mathematics, Integrated Science and Social Studies over the past month.
Using renowned footballer Lionel Messi as an example, Education Officer Junior Burgess told the students that the sportsman’s dream was to play football and he kept pushing and working at it to make it a reality. Likewise, he told them they had to have a dream and recognise that their achievements at school would contribute in some way toward the success of their dreams.
Using himself as an example as well, he told them that he had failed his second year at school, but rather than looking at it as a failure, he used it as inspiration to go on to receive good marks and make a success of himself.
School will be challenging, he told them, but they should not let it stop them, further congratulating those who came to summer school and did well.
Coordinator of the programme at the school, Andrea Rose, told them she was proud of their work over the period and reminded them that whatever they put in toward their own success they would reap three fold.
Teacher and facilitator Michelle Shepherd who admitted having a special place in her heart for the boys, asked them to look around and recognise that the majority of those in the classes were male. She said while girls could fail and still end up well-taken care of in later life, the burden of taking care of others would fall to boys as they got older, yet she said that society was constructed in such as way as to expect little of them.
She said that as boys they had to recognise their role in society and thanked those males who had made the extra effort to succeed in summer school.
All the participants received certificates for completing classes, but quite a few of them received extra prizes for best work in the individual subjects, while one male, Jaquan Greaves, who topped his group in Integrated Science and Maths also received the coordinator’s prize for deportment, behaviour, punctuality and determination. (LB)