Students to benefit from summer programme

SOME 6,000 fourth and fifth form students will, as of July 1, this year, start earning $2,500 each in a four-day summer week programme set to run for a month, Prime Minister P.J. Patterson has announced.

The Prime Minister had first disclosed the scheme in April during his contribution to the 2001/2002 Budget Debate, and last Tuesday, during a post-Cabinet press briefing, he said the summer programme is to be directly supervised by Fitz Jackson, State Minister in the Ministry of Education and Culture, who has responsibility for Youth.

"We have devised a programme that will involve every single parish in the island and we have assigned a number of students to be employed from each parish," Mr. Patterson said.

He said 30 per cent of the students will be selected by the Social Development Commission (SDC) in each parish, which will accept recommendations from the church, youth clubs, parish councillors and Members of Parliament. The remaining students are to be selected by the schools they attend.

"We would expect the principals to engage the students' councils in the selection of the students who are most deserving of being included in such a project," the Prime Minister said.

Mr. Patterson said, however, that the summer employment programme was not a replacement for the traditional "breaks" that individual Ministries give students annually. He said the private sector has also committed itself to employing several students, to dovetail the Government's initiative.

"Many of them have gone far down the wicket for this year in preparing to employ students and we wouldn't want to impede that in any way, but there are some who are now able to come on stream and work with the Government to make the programme as extensive as possible," the Prime Minister said.

Turning to the Jamaica Values and Attitudes Programme (JAMVATCORPS), which he also announced in April, he said the Government was in discussions with educational institutions and student representatives to iron out how the scheme is to work.

Mr. Patterson said Cabinet would deliberate on JAMVATCORPS and within two weeks he would lay a Ministry Paper in Parliament on the matter.

JAMVATCORPS will engage students in a prescribed work programme, the completion of which will contribute 30 per cent to their tuition fee for an academic year. The money will be paid directly to the institution they attend.

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