Turning back to local education news, Dr. Zabaneh also announced that the Ministry of Education will be placing focus on the part of the education sector that focuses on Adult and Continuing Education.
He said that these second-chance programs were sort of neglected during the last administration, and so they will be receiving an infusion of funding:
Dr. Louis Zabaneh - Minister of State/Education
"We have the preschool now. We have primary, secondary, and tertiary. We have the ITVET sector. And we have the ACS, the Adult and Continuing Education Sector. But we've neglected ACS so much that not many people would even know that we had this. So, in the U.S., for example, people would be familiar with GED. That's for - the same as in our case - students who have not completed high school to get a second chance to go to school. So, we have ACS institutions. I believe we have at least 11 of those across the country that are associated with high schools. So, for example, in Dangriga, we have the Ecumenical, which has an evening program. That is the ACS program. It is set up for students who didn't finish high school or may have not even gone to high school but now are adults. They have maybe children, or they have gotten married, etc... And now they want to go back to get an opportunity to get a high school degree and then go farther in their education if that's what their plan is. So, ACS has traditionally only had about a thousand students, when in fact, the number of students who have dropped out of high school over the years is in the multiple, in the tens of thousands. And so, we are seeing that we need to give more resources, more priority to the ACS. We have been in conversations with them who have told us, yes, we've been neglected, but people are knocking at our doors. People want to go back and get their high school degree, but they cannot afford it. We need more resources. We need more attention. So, Minister Fonseca has. That made that decision. So, there will be additional assistance now to the ACS sector when school reopens."
