Students and the Manning Cup teams of Calabar High School and Kingston College (KC) received well-needed support earlier this week from the David “Wagga” Hunt Scholarship committee.

The scholarship programme, involving Calabar and KC students, has been in existence since 2009.

“Although COVID came 2020, which caused a problem with us doing our standard presentation and our standard Wagga Hunt Classic which is the football extravaganza, we thought it very important to provide the teams with our usual subvention which is a full set of gears for the players of the current Manning Cup squad and the coaches,” Arnold McDonald, co-chairman of the David “Waga” Hunt Scholarship committee, said at a brief ceremony.

The Hunt family gave US$1,000 to the current Manning Cup team to help in supporting the team for this current programme, while the Calabar Old Boys’ Association (COBA) made a similar contribution to their Manning Cup team.

A presentation of the scholarship cheques was made to both schools, which every student on the scholarship programme gets $100,000 per year from Grade 8 to Grade 13.

Currently, there are 24 boys in the programme at KC and and Calabar.

“We are proud to be able to continue that because we know this is rough times and even more so with the challenge of COVID,” said McDonald.

“So, we have continued even under the challenge of COVID over the last 19 months, we have continued to raise the funds to be able to continue to support the scholarship initiative,” he continued.

Last year the committee started giving Chromebooks and laptops, from second form through to sixth.

There are two new KC students and two new Calabar students coming into the programme, and they will receive Chromebooks. The fifth formers going into sixth form will receive laptops.

In addition, the generous committee decided to give $15,000 per student to assist them and their families, funds which they may use at their own discretion.

Proven and Victoria Mutual Group have been onboard from the start and they have continued to support the programme, along with a number of other corporate entities. There are also contributions made by donors overseas.

Both Calabar and KC received $1 million for their infrastructure programmes to help with the remote learning earlier this year.

— Dwayne Richards