THE Howell Wilson Primary located in the little community of Ituni, Region 10, has raked in an overwhelming performance at this year’s National Grade Six Assessment Examination (NGSA). For a school located in a far-flung district with limited resources, Grade Six teacher Yvonne Nazier, is very proud that out of the 16 children in this year’s batch, five secured places at Region’s 10 top high school, Mackenzie High.

The school’s top child Tyler Dest scored 494 marks, a calculated percentage of 93.3. The other students are Glen Naipaul scoring 488, Asha Jameer scoring 481, Brenela Culpeper scoring 479 and Desmond Duke scoring 468. Reflecting on the many challenges the children faced while preparing for the examination as well as their unfortunate circumstances of practically being locked away from society, given the distance from Region 10’s capital town Linden, in addition to the lack of telecommunications as well as digital technology and internet access, Nazier said, “We did well, I feel very proud, they would have worked very hard.”

Unlike the children residing in Linden or even Kwakwani, Nazier related that the Ituni students are not exposed to current affairs due to the nonexistence of television stations or even newspapers in the community and so, effectively delivering the Social Studies syllabus can be extra difficult since the children are basically locked away in their own little domain. There is no Wi-Fi access and so with limited mobile data, research is very difficult.

Teaching is therefore done using the old traditional methods in a technological era, where even the curriculum is revised to suit this era. “They are not really au fait or familiar with what is going on around them, we try to take them on educational tours but as you know tours are pretty expensive so it’s not very often,” she lamented.

While many schools are equipped with computer laboratories and many communities in Region 10 have ICT hubs, Ituni students are tremendously disadvantaged in this regard and so Nazier, who is the lone Grade Six teacher at the school and who has been teaching for 30-odd years, had to work extra hard, for the results achieved at this year’s NGSA. “I would have done a lot of reading and we did a lot of extra lessons and the parents were grateful for that to push in the work,” she said

UNFORTUNATE SITUATION
Four out of five students would be beneficiaries of the Hinterland Scholarship Programme, which funds children through their five-year stint at secondary school if they gain a score no less than 470, and these students are granted the opportunity to utilise the dormitory at Linden. The others however have to either utilise the dormitory at Kwakwani or their parents have to seek guardians and upkeep them to attend school in Linden since Ituni does not have a secondary school.

Most of these parents find it very hard to upkeep their children in this way and while most of them do not have the ability to excel academically, Nazier believes that the best solution is to have a secondary school placed at Ituni. “Even if is up to Form Three because the parents spend a lot of money for them to stay at guardians and to upkeep them and to find transportation and so. Not all children have the ability to do well and it’s like a parent giving up a child at 12 years, so I believe the secondary school they had up here, should return,” she reasoned.

Nazier however, remains proud of what her class would have accomplished despite the odds and congratulates all the children for putting their best foot forward, as well as the teachers who would have collaborated with her in achieving the school’s success.