Face-to-face schooling got underway on Monday at the state-of-the-art Westminster Secondary School in Region Three.
The school was completed in April of this year and can accommodate 1000 students along with 60 teachers, a release from the Ministry of Education said.
Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand who visited the school to interact with the students and teachers on their first day, said that the school which is located in the Parfaite Harmonie community on the West Bank of Demerara is well poised to deliver well-rounded students.
The release said that Manickchand engaged with students who previously attended Dolphin Secondary (George-town) and Covent Garden Secondary (East Bank of Demerara) among other schools.
The opening of the school also enabled the closure of three secondary departments or ‘Primary Tops’ in primary schools in the region, specifically at the Goed Fortuin Primary, La Grange Primary and Windsor Forest Primary.
The Minister noted that children are usually placed in Primary Tops after they write the National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) and there is no space remaining in any of the secondary schools in the region. These children remain in primary school but are taught secondary level work.
According to the release, there are eleven departments at the school: Allied Arts, Agricultural Science, Business Studies, English, Home Economics, Industrial Technology, Information Technology, Mathematics, Modern Languages, Science, and Social Studies. Each department is equipped with trained teachers. The school also has a permanent Welfare Officer, Azharuddin Zahaur.
In addition to the CSEC programme, the school will be offering the Caribbean Vocational Qualification (CVQ) programme.
The school also has a Conference Room, Reading and Research Centre, Library, Language, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Agricultural Science Laboratories. In addition, the school has thirty-two classrooms, a dance studio, an Audio/Visual, Music Room and a large auditorium. Within the next three years, the school would be offering subjects for the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination to students of Region 3, the release said.
The release stated that the school was opened for the first time on September 6, 2021, for online learning with Tulsidai Raghubansi as the Headteacher and Lisa Henry-Aaron as the Deputy Headteacher along with a team of fifteen senior teachers and thirty -four junior teachers.
Over the recent months, these teachers were trained to use different digital facilities such as Google Classrooms, Google Meet, and Google Teams to deliver online classes. Teachers were also exposed to EMIS, Microsoft Excel and Google Drive.