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. She grieved differently from me. 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 happier to see Arianna overcome grief and shine.

“I am super proud of my daughter. I’m very grateful to Guardian Life for giving us a helping hand to send her back to school,” said Smith.

Edward Seaga Primary School Vice-Principal Caullet Ferguson was equally thrilled by Arianna’s 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.

“If there is a word higher than proud, that’s 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,” said Ferguson as she highlighted the school’s top boy, Pierre Mulgrave, who was also a recipient of the community scholarship.

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.

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.

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.

“You’re 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’t show up as though you are uncertain of what you carry with you because there’s nothing they have that you don’t already possess,” she said.

“The question is, ‘Will 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?’ 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,” charged Tomlinson-Carter.