The Commonwealth Open Schooling Association held its first regional conference today at the Biltmore. Now, Belize is relatively new to open schooling but the idea is to provide mothers, at risk youth, and drop outs - among others - a chance to complete their studies and jump start their career. Today, the main objective was to evaluate the current open school system and to find ways to enhance it. We spoke with coordinators at the conference and they told us why it is important to refine and broaden open schooling services in Belize.
Dr. Cynthia Thompson, Chair, Canada Caribbean Chapter of COMOS
"The movement is for us to spread open schooling in the region. currently we have open schools in Trinidad one here in Belize at the Gwen Lizarraga High School and we have as another goal which I guess the work continues after this for us to establish more open schools in the region. Our goal is 3 more open schools in 3 new countries. The open school really is the trying to reach students who are separated from their teacher in space and time really. So the idea of open and distance learning. But in an early presentation you've heard from Frances. We talk about innovative open schooling, trying to find ways of reaching children that will not necessarily involve technology, but in most instances 
it will involve trying to find the best ways of getting an education to them. Here for the conference we are focusing on working with schools, working with teachers to see how we can best reach individual students and individual students' needs."
Lorna Mckay, Director, Gwen Lizarraga Open School
"We teach several courses. We do 7 subjects; English, math, science, social studies, integrated science and we do entrepreneurial skills and IT. The students come from various backgrounds. Many of them are mothers, some of them are students themselves in other areas coming from Youth for the Future and other institutions. They come from the workplace. They do quite a bit with us. We do what is referred to as a blended mode where we teach some of them or most of them face to face, some of them do some online on Fridays."
Frances Ferreira, Education Specialist - Open Schooling
"Innovative schooling means that we can introduce technical and vocational education through open schooling by being creative and innovative and forming partnerships. Say for instance people in Trinidad, in Belize, people who are doing both mending and stuff like that, so if that person can be a partner through the open school you can send the students out there to do their practical. But we don't think like that. We just want them to go to technical institution."
The conference is a 3 day event. The theme of the conference is "Innovative Schooling: Transforming Pedagogy, Increasing Access, to ensure Learning."
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