The Government of Guyana through the Ministry of Education is continuing its book distribution drive in the nursery, primary and secondary schools.
“I believe the time is here now where we should make bigger and better efforts to write our text books, and the Ministry is going to be embarking on that aggressively so that we could really furnish more of our children with the materials they need,” Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand said during a press conference yesterday.
Students in the nursery schools are given three books while at the primary level students in Grades 1 and 2 receive 15 books, Grades 3 to 6 – 21 and Grades 6 to 12 – 18 books respectively.
Meanwhile, teachers at the nursery, primary and secondary schools receive 6, 9 and 12 books, respectively. These books are free of cost and include single-lined, doubled-line, checkered line and plain.
Minister Manickchand noted that the intention is for the exercise and text books to be distributed during the last week of school or during the first week of the new school year. Thus far, the Ministry has distributed books to Regions 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10 and Georgetown.
At present, the distribution process is ongoing in the Moruca District in Region One while Regions 6, 7 and 8 were expected to uplift their books today.
“Regarding text books we are now purchasing books directly from publishers…it is a very expensive enterprise and we have gotten fair discounts from publishers in the foreign countries, but even with the good discounts we are only able to buy very limited number of text books,” Minister Manickchand noted.
She indicated that this year the Ministry would only be purchasing five text books for secondary students at a cost of $50M. The Minister explained that the discounts were not previously offered to Guyana and as a result the Ministry was procuring the texts the way it did.
It is anticipated that for the next two years, the Ministry will continue to purchase texts however; in the meanwhile moves will be made for Guyanese to be engaged in compiling texts.
