PEP star vows to shine at Wolmer’s

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’s High School for Girls after being named among 46 recipients of the 2026 Guardian Group Scholarship and Grant. “I’m 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 — well, I know — I will do extremely well at Wolmer’s because I don’t want to go and not be a good student,” Arianna said at Guardian Group’s annual awards ceremony, hosted at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston on Monday.

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’s scholarships amount to just over $5 million. 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.

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. “I wanted to go to Wolmer’s because my mom really wanted me to go, and I wanted to make her proud. I’m really happy because PEP was a bit hard, but with my mom’s 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,” she said. 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. “When she heard the news [of her father’s death], she didn’t cry at all.

What she does is to cry in [her] sleep. I’m a crier, and she’s more of a fighter. She’s the one who tells me, ‘Mommy, it will soon get better’; ‘Mommy, wait till I get rich, I’m going to make sure everything is alright for you.’ Stuff like that...

She always tells me that she is not going through depression — but I insisted that we get her signed up for counselling because, as a mother, I know. So, we talked during everything because she’s my best friend,” she said. Placing a comforting arm around her daughter, her face lit up by a bright smile, Smith said she could not be happie…