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Hon. Patrick Faber, Minister of Education
"In terms of text books know that this initiative while we expect to have cuts in this area, we simply will not purchase the kind of purchase that we would have done under normal circumstance and so we expect that things could operate pretty normally. In terms of school transportation, we expect cuts in this area as well. However, we intent on sitting down with our contractors to work out a way forward. We are also very insistent on ensuring that the school feeding programs are kept at normal, or maybe even ramped up at the start of the new school year and so those school feeding programs in the rural area of the Belize District, the River Valley area, the southside of Belize City and also the one operational in Dangriga can count on seeing funds allocated for such initiatives. The high school subsidy program is going to continue, however, there is a modified version of this initiative and traditionally the allocation for a student subsidy ticket was $300, while it is difficult on all fronts to keep this program going all agreed in our ministry and also in the cabinet that the program must continue. However, we do need to make an adjustment and so the program will now see all these students who are moving on as I've outlined previously from primary school to secondary school receive $200. That's a reduction of $100 from $300 to $200. Likewise, those students who are being promoted from 1st to 2nd form as you know would have received the $300 subsidy in 2nd form. They too will continue to receive the subsidy, however that amount will be reduced from $300 to $200. The ministry regrets having to do this, but for us it is a must given the budget constraints that are upon us. The CSEC tuition scholarship program, this was offered to students who qualified by basically gaining 6 passes on the CSEC examinations, previous to now any students who receive those passes and made the requirement they would have receive their tuition paid to any amount of subjects that they signed up for. The changes that we have a set amount given the budget cuts for the allocation for these scholarships and so now dependent on the number of students who meet the qualification that lump sum of money will be divided appropriately among those who are qualifying for the scholarship and rather than we pay for the entire tuition load, the lump sum that you receive would be paid towards such tuition expenses that you will incur and then there is of course the payment of 6 CSEC exams including the local fee for the 2021 sitting for the sitting of the CSEC exams and at this time we will only say that we will do our best to try to keep this program alive and lastly, the primary school top performers evidently cant be selected this year as we have not administered the primary school exam and so in order to make up for that, not in its fullest capacity, but where as we would have offered 25 scholarships to those top performers we are now hoping to offer 15 full scholarships to be awarded based on merit."