And finally tonight, CitCo is giving back to primary schools across the city by donating cleaning and sanitation supplies to help them prepare for their reopening on Monday. In a ceremony held today, 31 schools received their packages.
Deputy Mayor, Allan Pollard, explained that the reason they decided to donate these supplies is because there should be no excuses to get kids back into the classrooms after two years of distance learning.
And one principal said that the donation came at the right time for her school, and is also reaching out to the public for further assistance.
Allan Pollard, Deputy Mayor, Belize City
"The primary purpose is that we know we had the whole hybrid learning, a lot of people were in school virtually and now being the transition to completely open and everyone in classroom, we found it necessary to not only give back to the kids but to the principals and teachers to have a safe environment for these kids, I know a lot of parents are, they have it in the back of their mind and they're worried about their children's safety while they're at school being that COVID isn't gone although the height of the pandemic has lowered but we want to ensure that kids are back safe, that they practice proper hygiene and we want to ensure that one of the excuses by the schools can't be that they don't have proper equipment or they don't have the proper tools to make sure that these kids are sanitizing or making sure that they're washing their hands, etc."
Diane Garnett, Principal, Grace Primary School
"Honestly when Mr. Fritz called yesterday, to me I felt elated, it's a welcomed reprieve, as you all know Grace Primary has just embarked on putting three new buildings at our Faber's Road campus since our school at Amara, some of the buildings are no longer usable and we had to do a whole lot of repairs so most of our funds have been exhausted in getting school back together and ready for Monday so this is really a gift that we truly truly appreciate and we would like to express our real gratitude to the City Council. There's a lot of planning that had to go in place because first we were thinking that we had to go back under COVID restrictions and so when we looked at the classrooms, the furniture did not have fit and then we had to go back to the drawing board and go back to what we had. A lot of things for our school had to be redone, not being in some of the room for almost two years, we had a lot of fixtures that needed to be fixed, we need windows repaired, floors repairs, our stairs, so we had a lot. Plus we had a new set of buildings at our Faber's Road campus so we got three new buildings, right now we're sourcing chairs, so if anybody wants to donate to us, we need somewhat like 90 chairs for standard 4 classrooms, so we're still in preparation mode."
The total value of the donation was $40,000.
