And from crime, to some good news on the education sector. The University of Belize will be allowing its students to sit their final exams despite not completing their tuition payments for this semester.
Usually, students who have not met their financial obligations are blocked from taking the exams, which puts a lot of pressure on the students struggling to finance their education. The pressure is even more, since COVID has put many families under a cash crunch.
But the light at the end of the tunnel for these students comes courtesy a letter written on behalf of the Minister of Education, Francis Fonseca, and his Minister of State, Dr Louis Zabaneh. They asked UB's Board to have consideration for the students, considering the pandemic and the fact that students are already at risk of falling behind academically.
Dr Zabaneh told us today via zoom that it was critical for the Ministry to reach out to the University, since they do not believe any student should be penalized for not having the financial means to complete tuition payments.
Dr. Louis Zabaneh, Minister of State in the Ministry of Education
"We had been receiving numerous request and grave concerns from students that they would not be able to take their final exam because of being unable to meet their obligations to the school. So that prompted us given the large number of request to contact the university and to ask them to kindly reconsider which they have done and for which we are grateful that they took that decision."
Reporter
"It's always a problem that students can't pay these really high tuition bills and that they are locked out of their exams. Is this something that the ministry is willing to work alongside UB to come up with some kind of plan for the future?"
Dr. Louis Zabaneh
"Absolutely, in our manifesto we made clear that we would be working very hard to make education affordable for all Belizeans and we made specific statements about free education from pre-school to sixth form. But we are also concern about students who go beyond sixth form and how they are able to access affordable education and definitely that is one of our priorities that we will be working on to find ways for students to achieve their dreams of getting a university education."
"We know that online delivery is a more cost effective way than face to face. However, there is still cost that have to be incurred in the process. Myself having had the fortunate experience as president at Galen University it was since 2012 that we launched live online education and we were able to reduce our tuition cost significantly giving scholarships to numerous persons across the country, because of the lower cost of delivery. So, that is certainly one of the factors that we will be looking at when we engage our leaders there at the University of Belize to determine what impact that has had on their cost of operations."
In UB's press release, they noted that the students will have to meet payment as it relates to grade release, approval for graduation, and/or registration for next semester.
