Close to 100 stu­dents of the Col­lege of Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Ap­plied Arts of Trinidad and To­ba­go (COSTAATT), whose class­es tran­si­tioned to on­line de­liv­ery mode be­cause of COVID-19, are ben­e­fit­ting from a do­na­tion of com­put­ers made by the Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um Com­pa­ny.

COSTAATT piv­ot­ed many of its class­es to on­line de­liv­ery, in two phas­es, af­ter Gov­ern­ment an­nounced the shut­down of all schools on March 13, in a bid to curb the spread of the pan­dem­ic.

As the school shut­down ex­tend­ed, it meant that a num­ber of stu­dents who had no ac­cess to com­put­ers at home were left with no choice but to with­draw from class­es.

That changed on Wednes­day, when COSTAATT’S board’s vice chair­per­son, Dr Ri­ta Pem­ber­ton and vice pres­i­dent, stu­dent af­fairs, Dr Camille Samuel, led a team of COSTAATT em­ploy­ees to Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um’s of­fice to col­lect the PCs and thank the com­pa­ny for help­ing to bridge the dig­i­tal di­vide.

“It’s a very im­por­tant ges­ture and we are grate­ful for the gen­eros­i­ty of Her­itage Pe­tro­le­um,” Dr Pem­ber­ton said, adding that “we will now have more peo­ple com­plet­ing their learn­ing.”

She af­firmed that it was a heart­en­ing re­flec­tion of the lev­el of gen­eros­i­ty that still ex­ists in the na­tion.

It was a sen­ti­ment echoed by Dr Samuel.

“Stu­dents are go­ing to be ex­treme­ly pleased by this ini­tia­tive. In fact, not on­ly will they be able to com­plete their stud­ies, it will help stu­dents to con­tin­ue their con­nec­tion with us. Dur­ing this time you can feel iso­lat­ed…now they can nav­i­gate these tur­bu­lent wa­ters with us.”

Her­itage’s chief fi­nan­cial of­fi­cer, Nigel Camp­bell, ex­plained the ra­tio­nale be­hind the com­pa­ny’s do­na­tion: “COVID-19 has dis­rupt­ed so many as­pects of our dai­ly rou­tines; for many stu­dents this means lack of ac­cess to the nec­es­sary tools for on­line learn­ing.

“Ed­u­ca­tion is an im­por­tant el­e­ment of our Cor­po­rate So­cial Re­spon­si­bil­i­ty pro­gramme, and so to­day’s do­na­tion is aligned with that fo­cus. We sin­cere­ly hope that it will bring some mea­sure of re­lief to the stu­dents of COSTAATT, who re­quire the as­sis­tance.”

The com­put­ers are be­ing dis­trib­uted on a loan arrange­ment to stu­dents across var­i­ous pro­grammes, who are in des­per­ate need of them to con­tin­ue pro­grammes of study at the col­lege.