By the time he was 18 years old, Akeel Tim­o­thy had writ­ten the CSEC ex­ams twice. The first time he failed all his sub­jects and on his sec­ond at­tempt, he achieved on­ly one pass.

Be­fore his third at­tempt, his moth­er sug­gest­ed that he en­list in the Mil­i­tary-Led Aca­d­e­m­ic Train­ing Pro­gramme (Mi­LAT), but Tim­o­thy did not want to spend the last two years of his teens in a mil­i­tary pro­gramme.

“She had to call my cousins for them to come and speak to me, beg me to go, beg me to go and I end up go­ing, but I didn’t want to go,” he ad­mit­ted.

He told his moth­er he did not de­serve to be placed in Mi­LAT be­cause he was not a bad child and the pro­gramme did not make sense to him. How­ev­er, his ex­pe­ri­ences in the pro­gramme at the Old Teach­ers’ Train­ing Col­lege Mau­si­ca Road (South), D’Abadie, led to a change of heart.

“The peo­ple that you would not ex­pect to be in a study group they were the ones ac­tu­al­ly there and sit­ting down. They have a lot of tat­toos, one or two of them had con­vic­tions. When they left Mi­LAT they were able to get prop­er jobs and, as I say, they are very bright,” he said.

Tim­o­thy said the pro­gramme helped him with his lack of mo­ti­va­tion when it came to study­ing and he be­lieves it can do the same for ex­pelled stu­dents.

He said the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion should not just thrust dif­fi­cult stu­dents back in­to the schools where they were fail­ing in the first place.

Last month, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly an­nounced that un­ruly stu­dents would be en­rolled in Mi­LAT af­ter ex­pul­sion.

The ini­tia­tive is be­ing sup­port­ed by ed­u­ca­tion stake­hold­ers, in­clud­ing the Na­tion­al Par­ent Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion and the T&T Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion.

The lat­est to be re­ferred to the pro­gramme were sev­en St An­tho­ny’s Col­lege stu­dents who were ex­pelled for fight­ing.

Tim­o­thy made it clear that the pro­gramme is very strict.

“The day starts at 4.30 am, every day,” he said, adding that in­duc­tion train­ing lasts for three months and en­tails ex­er­cis­ing, drills, chores and pun­ish­ment where nec­es­sary.

He ex­pressed grat­i­tude to in­struc­tors such as Sgt Roberts, Cpl Lane and Cpl Alexan­der who sup­port­ed him dur­ing his time in the pro­gramme.

“Those in­struc­tors walk with you. Yes, they tough, but they not they’re just to hold your hand to walk you through a field, they are there to make you and break you, they are there to give you that fa­ther­ly love, that big push that you need to know that, well okay, some­body is there for me so I need to be there for my­self,” he ex­plained.

Tim­o­thy, who is now 27 years old, said he want­ed to join the pro­tec­tive ser­vices but when that did not work out, he opened his own com­pa­ny, Ride Like Roy­al­ty Trans­port Ser­vices.

He said he was of­ten re­mind­ed by his fam­i­ly, es­pe­cial­ly his moth­er, about how he ben­e­fit­ed from lis­ten­ing to them.

With tears in his eyes, he said, “Thank you for nev­er giv­ing up on me, thank you for al­ways be­ing there.”