Sascha Wil­son

Na­pari­ma Col­lege, San Fer­nan­do, re­cent­ly held a dou­ble cer­e­mo­ny to cel­e­brate the out­stand­ing achieve­ments of its stu­dents and the for­mal open­ing of the school's mul­ti-mil­lion-dol­lar au­di­to­ri­um. At­tend­ed by Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning, the func­tion saw over 300 cer­tifi­cates, medals and tro­phies dis­trib­uted to stu­dents for per­for­mance in the Caribbean Sec­ondary Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate (CSEC) Caribbean Ad­vance Pro­fi­cien­cy Ex­am­i­na­tions (Cape), sports and for oth­er achieve­ments.

This year, the school re­ceived 21 na­tion­al schol­ar­ships, nine of which were open, and three Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies schol­ar­ships. In ad­di­tion, the school pro­duced top stu­dent in the CSEC ex­ams, Ryan Laloo. He was award­ed the Lax­mi Jew­ellers Pres­i­dent's Gold Medal and tied with Shiv­al Ma­haraj for the Car­vey's Print­ery Tro­phy for Out­stand­ing Achieve­ments in the O'Lev­el ex­ams.

Al­so re­ceiv­ing an award was Sid­diq Ali, son of vet­er­an jour­nal­ist Azard Ali. Sid­diq won a spe­cial­ist tro­phy for A-Lev­el Ge­og­ra­phy, as well as an ad­di­tion­al schol­ar­ship in En­vi­ron­men­tal Sci­ence. In de­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress, Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning com­mend­ed prin­ci­pal Dr Michael Dowlath and his ad­min­is­tra­tion for the school's ex­cep­tion­al re­sults at the na­tion­al ex­ams, which he said was un­doubt­ed­ly a col­lec­tive ef­fort in­volv­ing all stake­hold­ers.

Not­ing that col­lab­o­ra­tion among the school, home and com­mu­ni­ty is need­ed more than ever in the coun­try, he said, "It is crit­i­cal if our chil­dren are to be pre­pared for the ex­treme­ly com­pet­i­tive glob­al en­vi­ron­ment in which we live. We need this if we are to pro­duce the qual­i­ty and quan­ti­ty of suc­cess­ful grad­u­ates to meet the mod­ern