New school breakfast earns praise, first-day gripes

Some 17 000 students in the nursery and primary public school system were fed breakfast as a national programme launched across the island, according to Minister of Education Transformation Chad Blackman.

He told reporters at St Mary’s Primary School during a tour of the school on the first day of the new school year that the initiative is part of the government’s efforts to ease the burden on parents who are either unable to prepare breakfast or do not have the time due to early morning commutes.

He said: “The importance of this for us is to make sure that every Barbadian child at the primary school level who wants to have breakfast can have that. It eases the burden of the parent who may not be able to provide it. And it gives them that assurance that when they go off to work or they send their child to school that they can do so.”