– and is happy to help restore good name of Mackenzie High

MACKENZIE High School’s (MHS) top performer Zoe Sills has achieved her goal in returning glory to her school, which has been seeing a decline in Grade Ones and overall passes at the Caribbean Secondary Education Council (CSEC) examinations in recent years. This year, however, Mackenzie High had five students listed in the country’s top 233 performers and Zoe Sills, its top performer, gained 12 Grades Ones and one Grade Two.

Sills’ performance is not surprising to many as she is well known as a top performer as well as for her eloquent public-speaking and debating skills.

She described the journey as being very rough, as she had to sacrifice a lot of what she loved to achieve excellence. She believes, however, that strategising her work played an integral role in her success.

“Someone told me to try and finish my SBAs first and then put in the studying; I was getting nervous, because all of my friends were studying and the SBAs felt like a long process since you had to keep doing back things over and over again, but in the end it worked out and I was still able to be successful,” the overjoyed Sills said.

While her personal achievement warrants celebration, Sills is more ecstatic that she has dusted the negative rhetoric off of her school by putting it back in the position it once held, and that is as Linden’s premier high school.

“Honestly, that was my intention, everyone was putting down the school and I didn’t like that at all. I even encouraged my batch mates to work hard to lift the school up because last year, the top student got five Grade Ones and I knew that MHS was better than that, so I really encouraged them to do better for the sake of the school,” she told the Guyana Chronicle.

The young lady related that History was her most challenging subject. She thanked God, her parents, her friends and all those who pushed her to do well. She is hoping to pursue the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE) at the Bishop’s High School, but will be giving back to the Mackenzie High School in any way possible.