Spookie, alias of Stanlie Parkins, did it for me decades ago. The 87-year-old St Andrew High School for Girls will not do it for its students. The school’s handbook, with its commandments from Mount St Andrew, forbids it. All students must sit the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) only in the final year, grade 11. And that is that.
As a fourth-former in what was then the newest traditional high school in the country, I discovered that I was registered for English and history in the GCE examinations. I was in a panic at the discovery. How was I going to tell my poor mother already struggling to keep me in school that, quite unexpectedly and without any warning whatsoever, she owed examination fees?