Tracy Panton Supports 700 Students With School Grants and Supplies

More than 700 students from the Albert Division in Belize City have benefitted from a back-to-school support program headed by Area Representative Tracy Panton. The initiative, which began on August 1, sees students from low-income families receiving tuition grants, fees, and book support as well as backpacks and school supplies. The initiative covers students at the primary, high school, and sixth form levels. Notably, Panton has been doing distributions without any publicity. She told our newsroom that she has kept quiet about the initiative out of respect for her constituents. 

Tracy Panton, Leader of the Opposition: “We have been working on our annual Back to School initiative. It is the signature initiative for my office for the last 10 years. We started the program in 2015. We don’t take pictures. We’re not show and tell because we believe that we must preserve the dignity of our young students and their families. The people who come to us for help are the ones that are most vulnerable or are living on the margins and it is our hope that with the initiative that we do every year we can give them a hand up and we can get our students going back to school feeling prepared to embrace the new school year. You know, their bags, their books, the uniform support that we provide, tuition grant support. We do these things quietly. The people who get impacted know. The people who need the help know that they can come. and that they know that their privacy and their dignity will always be  preserved in this constituency because they’re family, right? We are an Albert family. We take that seriously and we take education very seriously. We obviously give thanks to the Government of Belize for the tuition grant support that they provide for constituencies to our young students. It is needed. Education is not free, can never be free in my view. The cost of education is extremely high and every year we see the school invoices that we receive, all kinds of new fees being introduced because the schools are trying to survive. They’re trying to provide a quality education and they need to pay for it. And so we do our part as an Albert Action Committee to contribute to the education of our young minds.”

The initiative will run until August 31