{"id":2828,"date":"2026-09-02T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/uncategorized\/pep-star-vows-shine-wolmers\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T12:00:00","slug":"pep-star-vows-shine-wolmers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/trust-news\/pep-star-vows-shine-wolmers\/","title":{"rendered":"PEP star vows to shine at Wolmer\u2019s"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Renae Osbourne<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

September 2, 2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Arianna
Arianna Smith (left) and Pierre Mulgrave with Debby Livingstone and Krystal Tomlinson-Carter at the Guardian Group awards. Photo: Garfield Robinson \/ Jamaica Observer, 2 September 2026.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

WITH the support of an academic award behind her, Primary Exit Profile (PEP) scholar Arianna Smith has vowed to leave a lasting mark at Wolmer\u2019s High School for Girls after being named among 46 recipients of the 2026 Guardian Group Scholarship and Grant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m really happy and proud of myself, and I feel like this is just another step towards becoming a chemist, because I really want to be one. So I hope \u2014 well, I know \u2014 I will do extremely well at Wolmer\u2019s because I don\u2019t want to go and not be a good student,\u201d Arianna said at Guardian Group\u2019s annual awards ceremony, hosted at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston on Monday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the past 20 years Guardian Group has awarded more than $70 million to assist 219 top-performing sixth graders entering high school. This year\u2019s scholarships amount to just over $5 million.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The programme targets the children of active Guardian Life policyholders and company employees, while also extending support to top national performers and specific primary schools in selected communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arianna, the top girl from Edward Seaga Primary and a community scholarship recipient, told the Jamaica Observer that the award has motivated her to keep excelling throughout high school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI wanted to go to Wolmer\u2019s because my mom really wanted me to go, and I wanted to make her proud. I\u2019m really happy because PEP was a bit hard, but with my mom\u2019s support it became pretty easy. It makes me very happy to see how this impacts my life and that everything I went through gave me great rewards,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also beaming with pride was her mother, Ricola Smith, who told the Observer that she had to step up and support her daughter after her father passed three years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen she heard the news [of her father\u2019s death], she didn\u2019t cry at all. What she does is to cry in [her] sleep. She grieved differently from me. I\u2019m a crier, and she\u2019s more of a fighter. She\u2019s the one who tells me, \u2018Mommy, it will soon get better\u2019; \u2018Mommy, wait till I get rich, I\u2019m going to make sure everything is alright for you.\u2019 Stuff like that\u2026 She always tells me that she is not going through depression \u2014 but I insisted that we get her signed up for counselling because, as a mother, I know. So, we talked during everything because she\u2019s my best friend,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Placing a comforting arm around her daughter, her face lit up by a bright smile, Smith said she could not be happier to see Arianna overcome grief and shine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am super proud of my daughter. I\u2019m very grateful to Guardian Life for giving us a helping hand to send her back to school,\u201d said Smith.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edward Seaga Primary School Vice-Principal Caullet Ferguson was equally thrilled by Arianna\u2019s accomplishments, and noted that she was delighted to see her students rising above the stigma that is sometimes attached to the school located in the inner-city community of Denham Town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf there is a word higher than proud, that\u2019s how I am today because people do not expect our students to aspire any higher. To know that we had so many traditional high school passes this year, trust me, it has been phenomenal. It has been a blessing,\u201d said Ferguson as she highlighted the school\u2019s top boy, Pierre Mulgrave, who was also a recipient of the community scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pierre, who will enter Camperdown High School this academic year, is a young man of few words but sharp intellect, confident in his future trajectory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He told the Observer that he did not struggle with his PEP examinations and expects to maintain that calibre of excellence as he tackles secondary education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For her part, keynote speaker Krystal Tomlinson-Carter encouraged scholarship recipients to use the award as a reminder that they are capable of greatness. She urged them to be courageous as they take on high school, and to never be shy to walk into any room with their heads held high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou\u2019re walking in an inheritance that nobody can take from you. When you show up on the stage at church, at the stage that is your classroom, on the stage that is the world, don\u2019t show up as though you are uncertain of what you carry with you because there\u2019s nothing they have that you don\u2019t already possess,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe question is, \u2018Will I be disciplined enough? Will I be focused enough? Will I have the courage and the confidence to use the keys that I have been given?\u2019 The beauty about education is that once you have it, nobody can come back and take it from you. Once you have it, it is yours for as long as you want to acknowledge that you are educated,\u201d charged Tomlinson-Carter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: Jamaica Observer<\/a>, 2 September 2026. Republished for the Wolmer\u2019s Trust community with attribution.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Renae Osbourne September 2, 2026 WITH the support of an academic award behind her, Primary Exit Profile (PEP) scholar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2826,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trust-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wolmers.org\/trust\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}