Belmont students get a helping hand

AS Barbados continues to transition to online learning for its school-aged students, one school is being given a helping hand so as to not be left behind. Yesterday, Belmont Primary School received a donation of ten Amazon Kindles primed and ready for application in the local setting.

With the generous donation coming from a partnership between Steinbok Management Services and Genius Lynk, Project Manager with the former, Orson Alleyne, handed over the devices to Belmont’s Principal Pamela Ifill at the school yesterday. Speaking to The Barbados Advocate, Alleyne stated that the construction project management firm recognised their social responsibilities and jumped at the opportunity to lend a helping hand, given the climate created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“As we look around, we see that classrooms are now moving to the virtual settings and there are so many families that are unable to provide the hardware and equipment to access such a forum. It was to this end that we decided to play our role in this collaboration with Genius Lynk in providing these ten Amazon Kindles, preloaded already with the G Suite application software,” he noted.

Principal Ifill said that she was very pleased and grateful for the donation as it would go a long way to fulfilling some of the needs of the school’s students.

“It means a whole lot. We started out with about 75 children, maybe a little bit more since parents have gone back out to work and their cellphones are not available anymore to the students. So I started to reach out to persons that I knew who I think knew people and the response has been tremendous.

We are very, very grateful to Steinbok Management Services for their generous donation. Others have reached out as well, so we are well on target to providing the devices needed for all our students. We have a population of students who are very much in need – not just tablets – but even in terms of food stuff and things like that. So we have been, as a staff, reaching out to persons who we believe can help to fill the gap in any way that they can at his time,” she said.

Alleyne went on to say that although he knew their donation was a small one, he urged others to make similar contributions as that would help to ease the burden on those who felt the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic the most.

“While we make this contribution and it would give some assistance, we recognise that there is still such a great need and so we also want to encourage others to give to the cause because we don’t desire to see any child left behind as it relates to education. So we just decided to see what little we could do or what was available that we could do in this effort as we heard the appeal and the need,” Alleyne said. (MP)