In the bat­tle to pass for pres­tige schools in the an­nu­al cy­cle of Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment ex­ams, Ex­cel Beetham Es­tate Pri­ma­ry School stu­dents were not to be left out. The school, which is lo­cat­ed at the north­west­ern end of the Beetham Gar­dens, seems in­ter­twined in the stig­ma the com­mu­ni­ty holds. It serves sev­er­al com­mu­ni­ties in the area in­clud­ing the Beetham Gar­dens, Sea Lots, Mor­vant and en­vi­rons.

“Sea Lots used to have a lot of shoot­ing. It wasn’t a good area to grow up.

In fact, it was a nice area, but the peo­ple weren’t so nice,” said Chelsea Matthew, who passed for St Fran­cois Girls’ Col­lege. She wants to be a pe­di­a­tri­cian.

There were strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties in the sto­ries of sev­er­al SEA stu­dents Guardian Me­dia spoke to yes­ter­day at the school.

Bound for Trin­i­ty Col­lege East, Mikhael Pe­ters re­called, “Some­times it had shoot­ing in the night and it was hard to study.”

For scores of stu­dents at Ex­cel Beetham Es­tate, their suc­cess is sim­i­lar to that of oth­er stu­dents from around the coun­try, how­ev­er, their child­hood ex­pe­ri­ences vast­ly dif­fer from the av­er­age pupil.

Em­manuel Williams, who is from the Beetham com­mu­ni­ty and passed for St An­tho­ny’s Col­lege, said, “There was so much shoot­ing, fight­ing, curs­ing, and dif­fer­ent things. I used to get fright­ened, but I still made it through the SEA.”

As they marked a mile­stone in their young lives, these stu­dents are not mere­ly search­ing for a way out of their hot spot com­mu­ni­ties.

In­stead, they would all like to con­tribute to chang­ing the land­scapes of the places they live. Still elat­ed af­ter pass­ing for her first choice of Prov­i­dence Girls’, Camille Fred­er­ick, who is al­so the pre­fect of her school, said, “It feels nice be­cause I can now make a change to the com­mu­ni­ty so that oth­ers will not see my com­mu­ni­ty as a place where on­ly bad things and peo­ple come out.”

In their quest to be­gin mak­ing a change, the stu­dents have de­cid­ed to tar­get their peers and those com­ing af­ter them. “I would like to show chil­dren from this com­mu­ni­ty that even though if you come from a bad com­mu­ni­ty, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have suc­cess,” Pe­ters ex­plained.

He wants to be an en­gi­neer while Fred­er­ick has her mind set on be­com­ing a chef.

As they move on to the next chap­ter in their lives, the stu­dents thanked the staff of Ex­cel Beetham Es­tate Pri­ma­ry School for their as­sis­tance over the years.

Pe­ters said his school is no longer sit­ting on the side­lines and watch­ing oth­ers suc­ceed, “I saw oth­er schools mak­ing it to the top and I want­ed the same for this school.”