Skai’s the limit! - Self-motivated 11-y-o overcomes odds to shine as Hague’s PEP star

Six years ago, when Skai Harvey began her journey at the Hague Primary and Infant School in Trelawny, her classroom was a computer screen. 
Like the many students who started school during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, her schooldays were spent in virtual classrooms, broken mainly for scheduled breaks. Occasionally, too, she would engage in online games after school with her friends. 
“It was the order of the day,” her mother, Melicia Hylton, told The Sunday Gleaner. “It was what we knew”. 
But, even during those times, Hylton noticed something that set her daughter apart; she was intrinsically motivated. Even without a teacher physically present to supervise her, Skai’s desire to learn and the pride that she took in her work gave her almost laser-focus.
So Hylton was not surprised when the diligence she had showcased throughout her school tenure was rewarded with her coming out as the top-performing student in the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams at her school, scoring 377.1 out of 400.
“I feel happy, very happy and excited for the hard work that I did,” Skai told The Sunday  Gleaner. 
The 11-year-old will be moving on to the Montego Bay High School for Girls in St James, come September, and said she is enthused to be in a different learning environment. 
Describing her youngest of two daughters as “naturally bright”, Hylton said Skai has never missed a chance to impress her. 
“[She] always amazed me based on the conversations that she would come to me and try to have, and I’m always looking on and smiling based on some of the topics that she would raise, and so on. She is a reader. She loves to read and I admire that about her,” she said. 
Although she ensured that she printed PEP past papers and helped Skai identify and work on her weak areas, Hylton said she never worried about Skai academically.  Over the years, Skai had proven herself to be self-reliant – a trait she said she inherited from her father, Cornwall College and University of Technology, Jamaica alumus Davian Harvey, who passed away in August 2015 when she was just 11 months old.
At her graduation ceremony just over a week ago, she was awarded Top PEP Student, Top Girl, and Top Mathematics Student.
“One of the saddest parts is just not having her father around to witness her achievements like this. But I know that, if he was here, he would be there helping her to study, and so on,” she said. 
That independence proved crucial in the months leading up to the PEP exams, Hylton said, especially after Hurricane Melissa. Hague Primary and Infant School served as a shelter for residents of the Trelawny Infirmary, who remained there for nearly three months after the infirmary was destroyed, delaying the resumption of face-to-face classes until the second week of January.
Virtual classes
Skai also benefited from her experience with virtual classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, as she once again had to work independently.
“I did some of the activities in my textbooks, and I read through the information so that, when my teacher would be teaching us those things, I would already have some knowledge,” she stated. 
Her schoolmate Zahier McLaughlin said he hardly recalls those COVID-19 years, but remembers having to be in online classes for most of the day.
Nonetheless, he believes he was learning, stating that he paid attention, and tried to understand what was being communicated by his teacher via his tablet screen. 
When that learning dispensation ended, he was more than happy to go back into the physical classroom to meet his friends, with whom he had maintained communication with through texts and calls.
But he admits to initially being distracted. 
“I wasn’t focusing in class, not doing schoolwork. I was just talking to friends,” he told The Sunday Gleaner.
Eventually, the 11-year-old said he came to the realisation that wasting his time was not worth it, and started making a greater effort to do well in his PEP examinations.
In his graduation ceremony just over a week ago, he was awarded Most Improved Student after scoring 310 out of 400.
“When I got the award, I felt joy and happiness,” said the youngster, who also took home the Most Helpful Student Award. 
His grandmother Mitzie Gordon said she has believed in Zahier’s potential, and is happy to see it come to fruition. 
“The teachers would always say he has the ability but just wasn’t producing when the time was right. That’s all you kept hearing,” she said. “He loves company. There were days he wouldn’t do schoolwork – a lot challenges with him. But, this time around, he settled much better and tried much harder and he was successful.”
“Resilience batch”
Describing his 2026 graduating class as the “resilience batch”, Principal Dameian Elvin told The Sunday Gleaner that he is impressed with how they have overcome the challenges of COVID-19 and the ones posed by the recent hurricane. 
Of the 152 students who graduated, 107 were proficient in mathematics and 114 were proficient in language arts. 
Social studies and integrated science were omitted from this year’s grade six exams.
Meanwhile, 124 of 152 students achieved full mastery in literacy, while only nine students did not achieve mastery or near mastery in numeracy. 
“... really encouraging”
“With respect to the circumstances, to watch them bounce back that kind of way is really encouraging,” Elvin said. “By virtue of what the performances turned out to be, we can conclude that they really recovered and did the best that they could and, as a result, got the placements that they got.”
PEP evaluates Jamaican students across grades four, five, and six. Grade Five focuses heavily on open-ended performance tasks for language arts and mathematics. Grade Six focuses on ability tests and curriculum-based tests, to place students into secondary schools.
A total of 31,868 students sat PEP at the grade-six level on April 29 and 30.
In mathematics, 61 per cent of students were classified as proficient and eight per cent as highly proficient. For language arts, 66.5 per cent of students were deemed proficient and 5.5 per cent highly proficient.
Linvern Wright, principal of William Knibb Memorial High School in Trelawny, where some Hague Primary students, including Zahier, will matriculate in September, told The Sunday Gleaner that the results of the PEP exams over the last two years are showing that the learning loss caused by COVID-19 is becoming less significant. 
“I’ve seen some level of improvement, certainly at my school, and some level of improvement in their performance at the different grade levels that they have been in. So my grade seven and eight are doing a little better.” 
He, however, noted that the possible long-term effects of the pandemic should not be ignored. He said practice and support sessions were held at his school for these students, but this was disrupted by the hurricane. 
Before school resumes in September, he said summer school is being held at his school, but attendance is not compulsory.
“We just need to focus on teaching them well, trying to ensure that resources are there to help them, to get them to where they want, especially support. I think that our system is weak on support and proper targeting of issues that they might have,” he said. 
sashana.small@gleanerjm.com