The Westminster Secondary School is finally completed and will be ready for the new school year starting September 2021. Today, the Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand visited the state-of-the-art facility, which is located in the La Parfaite Harmonie community of Region Three.
The Chief Education Officer, Dr. Marcel Hutson, Regional Education Officer, Mr. Devindra Persaud, Coordinator of the Guyana Secondary Education Improvement Project (GSEIP), Mr. Jimmy Bhojedat, and Special Projects Officer, Ron Eastman along with the contractor and consultant accompanied Minister Manickchand on today’s visit.
The contract to build the Westminster Secondary School was awarded to R. Bassoo and Sons. Construction began in October 2018 and was scheduled to be completed in January 2020. On assuming office in August 2020, Education Minister Priya Manickchand had stressed Government’s zero tolerance for delayed works and warned contractors to ensure that work is done within the contractual time. She said that the Ministry had worked closely with R. Bassoo and Sons Construction Inc and the consulting firm Deen and Partners/SRKN Engineering to ensure the school is completed.
The total cost of the school is approximately $1B and was funded by the World Bank through the GSEIP. All of the furniture and necessary equipment have already been bought and will be installed as soon as the building is handed over to the Ministry.
The Westminster Secondary School has 32 classrooms, a language lab, dance studio, library, Physics, Chemistry and Biology laboratories, an Information Technology Laboratory, a theatre room, a Mathematics laboratory, Home Economics Laboratory and an Agriculture Science Laboratory, among other facilities.
It will accommodate 1000 students and will therefore be a Grade A school. For now, it will be categorized as a List B school which speaks to quality but that status will change over the next two years according to the Minister. She added that the Ministry intends to make the school a Sixth Form school to offer the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE).
She said that the school will be staffed with competent graduate teachers and the relevant staff. Minister Manickchand said that the school will be a model to show that once resources are available coupled with trained teachers, children from any part of Guyana can perform well.
