September ought to be the most significant month in the lives of school children and in the entire school year. It is the start of everything; starting out at school; starting a new class; starting tertiary and university education. The previous July children who had completed their CXC examinations had come to the end of their days at secondary school. A minority, their CXC grades allowing, would take a tilt at the sixth form. Most of them, however, would explore such other options as their circumstances allowed. Entry into the University of Guyana might be one option. Another might be writing myriad applicatiuons in the hope of being favoured for one of a handful of ‘openings’ that might bring little more than a subsistence level reward. Increasingly these days leaving school means slipping into idleness or crime or else finding some dead end job that suppresses ambitions that might have been there not much earlier.
Come September, those whose days in school had come and gone would miss the sense of belonging that had been created by the uniform