Minister Fonseca Touts Success of Government’s Free Education Program

Minister of Education Francis Fonseca says the government’s free education program has produced significant results. The Ministry of Education has seen an increase in enrollments in the three Belize City high schools it has been rolled out, as well as better grades in those schools. The program has been noted as a success and many parents have welcomed the financial ease. Yesterday, Fonseca spoke about the significance and the benefits it produced. 

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade: “In my view it’s one of the best initiatives that we have launched at the Ministry of Education. You know the E Up, we call it the E Up Education Upliftment Project Together We Rise so as you rightly pointed out we will now expand it in the new fiscal year to twelve additional schools across the country. And as I always remind people it’s not just about tuition. Of cours the objective is to increase enrollment to get our young people back into the classroom to make sure that they stay there that’s the objective but it’s not just about tuition. It’s about making sure that they have access to digital devices. It’s about a school feeding program that’s attached to these schools, it’s about uniforms, supplies, you know it’s about transportation all of these issues so it’s a complete wrap around approach to ensuring that we’re delivering quality education. So we’ve had you know apart from the increase in the enrollment we’ve seen an improvement in the performance of our students in many of these schools you know so again this is a very very good program. It relieves parents and families across the country from that burden. We know that young people have difficulties in terms of meeting the cost of education sometimes and so we want to do everything we can to support them. So it’s a very positive all around it’s a very positive program and we’re very very excited about the future expansion of it beyond next year you know. Ultimately our objective is that all across the country we can have this program in place to relieve parents and families from the burden of the cost of education at the secondary level.”

The program is expected to be expanded to a dozen schools this year.