Top performers in Associate’s degree programme at SVGCC to be paid $500

Students who perform well in the Associate’s degree programmes being offered by the St Vincent and the Grenadines Community College (SVGCC) will also receive the $500 award traditionally paid to high performers in the CSEC and CAPE exams.{{more}}

At a meeting of the Unity Labour Party (ULP) at Layou last Sunday, Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves said that students who achieve a minimum B plus grade in the Associate’s degree programme will be included in the pay-out.

He said he had asked the director of the SVGCC and chief education officer Lou-Anne Gilchrist to provide him with the names of the students who had achieved that standard.

“… I say send me the names for those and I will find money too to give them the $500…. Rejoice. That is a birthday a present from the Unity Labour Party (ULP),” Gonsalves chimed, adding the decision was made in Cabinet on October 14.

The $500 initiative, which began in 2005, was initially paid to students who obtained five CSCE subjects, including Mathematics and English.

Gonsalves said this year, 198 students who passed two subjects and communications studies at the A level/CAPE exams and 547 who passed five subjects, including English and Math at CSEC level, had been approved to get the pay-out by the end of October or early November, for their accomplishment.

The total number of students to receive the payments is in excess of 1,000, Gonsalves said.

The Prime Minister said Cabinet also approved 14 five-year national scholarships; five fully funded three-year scholarships and 12 bursaries, for which the Government pays the economic cost of $20,000 a year to the University of the West Indies (UWI) and gives students $20,000 a year.

“It was the business of us to help approximately 100 young Vincentians, most of them from the poor and the working people, to advance themselves forward,” Gonsalves said.

He noted that Cabinet approved for selection, before year end, 65 young persons to enter the nursing programme at the Division of Nursing of the SVGCC.

“We are training more nurses now than we need and that’s why we exporting them. And what we are doing with our nurses, we are the only country in the world where we give you a free nursing education and then turn around and pay you $1,000 a month to go to nursing school. That is something we should rejoice,” Gonsalves said.

According to Gonsalves, when the ULP took office in 2001, there was a shortage of nurses and he asked then Cuban president Fidel Castro to send 20 here to assist.(KW)