Teaching the youth
TEACH the Youth, the annual summer outreach project of the University of Technology, Jamaica’s Students’ Union Council, is off to a good start with the enrolment of more than 600 students from five communities in Kingston and St Andrew.
The project, which operates summer classes at select locations in August Town, Kintyre, Tavern, Highlight View and Sandy Park, seeks to harness the talents of young men and women, and inspire them to be agents of change in their respective neighbourhoods. It got underway on Monday, July 13, and will end on Friday, July 31.
The students, aged 6 to 18 years, will be engaged in art, English, mathematics, social studies, information technology, science, and reading comprehension. The programme will also feature ‘Empowerment Thursdays’, where members of corporate Jamaica will engage the students in motivational sessions and personal development tutorials in areas such as entrepreneurship, leadership, and career development.
To that end, Digicel made a commitment to support the initiative with a cheque for $350,000, which was presented at the launch event to help offset costs associated with hosting the summer school.
Speaking at the launch at UTech’s Technology Innovation Centre recently, Akili Henney, director of community service in the union, said “one of the main aims of this programme is to foster integration with communities surrounding the university.”
The programme also seeks to improve basic literacy of the younger enrollees, while the older participants are expected to be able to fill out forms and write job applications at the end of the period.
For his part, Digicel’s Director of Marketing Peter Lloyd said: “Youth championing and youth development are great way to steer the direction of the future of our country.”
The activities will culminate with a sports day on the UTech campus.
Meanwhile, Henney said the roll-out of this year’s project is proceeding well and is on schedule.
“We have done the pretesting already, and we are ready to go full speed to capitalise on the time we have with the students,” he said.
He explained that enrollees in the programme are given a pretest evaluation to determine their level of knowledge, “so we can teach what they don’t know”. At the end of the programme, the students are again evaluated to see if the objectives of the projects have been achieved.
The theme of this year’s programme is: Unleash Your Potential… Empowered for Greatness.
The sponsors include Appliance Traders Limited, the Jamaica Information Service , Jamaica National Building Society, Digicel, Island Road Trio, Lasco, Reggae Jammin, Uncommon Arts, FAME FM, IWatch Campus, IGL, COK Sodality Credit Union, and Jamaica Producers.
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