British High Com­mis­sion­er, Arthur Snell re­cent­ly vis­it­ed the Ex­cel Com­pos­ite Pri­ma­ry School, Beetham Gar­dens to meet with stu­dents and staff.

While at the school, Mr Snell read Dr Seuss' eco­log­i­cal para­ble The Lo­rax to a rapt au­di­ence who then en­thu­si­as­ti­cal­ly dis­cussed what should be done to save their frag­ile en­vi­ron­ment. The High Com­mis­sion­er was al­so giv­en a tour of the school by Prin­ci­pal Ann An­toine. He saw their well-equipped com­put­er lab, mu­sic room and li­brary.

A re­lease from the British High Com­mis­sion­er said High Com­mis­sion­er Snell was in­ter­est­ed to find out more about the ex­cel­lent work go­ing on in the Beetham com­mu­ni­ty. Of in­ter­est to him is an af­ter school pro­gramme at Ex­cel Com­pos­ite.

The pro­gramme is fund­ed by BG T&T and is man­aged by the Ro­tary Club of Cen­tral Port-of-Spain.

This pro­gramme is held each af­ter­noon from 2.45 pm to 5 pm and tar­gets stu­dents in stan­dards three and four. The goal is to im­prove aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance, with the long term ob­jec­tive of suc­cess­ful SEA com­ple­tion, en­sur­ing en­try in­to sec­ondary schools.

While the home­work pro­gram fo­cus­es pri­mar­i­ly on aca­d­e­m­ic per­for­mance, there are a num­ber of oth­er com­po­nents which have been in­te­grat­ed to both mo­ti­vate and re­ward the chil­dren who par­tic­i­pate. These in­clude:

Jump rope class­es

Field vis­its to places such as the Em­per­or Val­ley Zoo and Movi­etowne

Com­put­er lit­er­a­cy class­es

Mu­sic and dance

Civic pride

The British High Com­mis­sion is look­ing for­ward to work­ing with the Ex­cel Com­pos­ite School as well as com­mu­ni­ty groups at the Beetham Gar­dens.

To help stock the school's li­brary, the British High Com­mis­sion is col­lect­ing used or new chil­dren's books (for ages 0-14). These can be dropped off at the High Com­mis­sion of­fices, 19 St Clair Av­enue, St Clair.

MORE IN­FO

The Ro­tary Club of Cen­tral Port-of-Spain is part of the in­ter­na­tion­al Ro­tary fam­i­ly, which is made up of 1.3 mil­lion pro­fes­sion­als in over 33,000 clubs. Ro­tar­i­ans fo­cus on fel­low­ship through ser­vice, cre­at­ing bonds of friend­ship and part­ner­ship through ser­vice to the com­mu­ni­ty.

Al­though club projects vary ac­cord­ing to lo­cal needs, our uni­ver­sal mis­sion, led by our Ro­tary Foun­da­tion, is the erad­i­ca­tion of po­lio.

The club, led by Pres­i­dent Ra­bindra Out­ar, com­pris­es 41 mem­bers, who meet each Thurs­day at noon at the Nor­mandie ho­tel in St Ann's for fel­low­ship, speak­ers and ser­vice up­dates.

To learn more please vis­it www.ro­tarycen­tral­pos.org and www.ro­tary.org, or find them on Face­book.