Plans are in place for the building of a central, high quality science laboratory.
This is according to Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, who also holds ministerial responsibility for post secondary education.
The Prime Minister who was at the time speaking on the Issue At Hand program said that the facility is expected to cover a wide range of sciences.
“What we intend to do is to build a central high quality science laboratory to deal with chemistry, physics, biology, zoology, botany, mathematics, geology, information/communication technology, robotics, sound engineering, the whole range of what you may call traditional sciences and other cutting edge forms of technology,” he said.
While speaking of a possible location for the lab, Dr. Gonsalves noted that it will be in the care of the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Community College. He also discussed the benefits that will be derived from the establishment of such a facility.
“We want to locate it—as you going up to Frenches—there’s a lot of lands, where the former national youth council used to be accommodated, going all up inside that area. The idea as presently advised is that we will put that in the hands of the community college but with a memorandum of understanding with the [UWI] Open Campus. Now it means that you would be able to do your pre-med courses there, it means that you’d be able do degrees or at least up to two years certainly, but hopefully in certain other sciences, the ones you may call the hard sciences, full degrees and of the course the community college, while it has its own lab out at the Villa campus, its students will also be able to make use of it,” Gonsalves said.
The Prime Minister said that this would be a major expansion of the offerings of tertiary education here, on the ground, in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
