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At just 10 years old, Aamir Khan received a life-shattering diagnosis: an aggressive form of brain cancer called medulloblastoma. What followed was a grueling years-long battle that included multiple invasive surgeries, repeated stays in intensive care, and a full year of debilitating radiation and chemotherapy treatments. In April 2018, after months of intense treatment at Trinidad’s Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex, Khan walked out of the hospital, ringing the traditional end-of-treatment bell to mark that he was officially cancer-free.

Before his diagnosis, Khan was an active young athlete, competing in track and field for his primary school and playing cricket with the Harvard Cricket Club. The cancer and its treatments left him with lasting side effects: limited mobility, impaired short-term memory, partial hearing loss, a squint, and a persistent limp. But within days of his release, the 15-year-old had only one goal: to return to the classroom and finish the education he had been forced to pause.

Determined to pick up where he left off, Khan restarted his primary education at Standard Three. Even with significant memory challenges that made studying far harder for him than his peers, he earned straight A grades in his first year back, advancing to Standard Four and moving steadily toward his goal of sitting the Secondary Entrance Examination (SEA) to secure a spot at his top-choice secondary school, Trinity College East. In 2021, with support from his three younger siblings who helped him prepare, Khan sat for the SEA. He not only completed the exam — he finished ahead of schedule — and earned admission to Trinity College East, fulfilling his long-held dream.

Six years after he entered secondary school, Khan’s educational journey hit another obstacle: he developed severe seizures in Form Three that forced doctors to advise him against continuing in-person classes. Refusing to let his dream of graduation die, Khan and his mother Adita Khan made a new plan: Adita would step in to homeschool him, while he continued pursuing his education part-time through the A+ Tuition Academy, working through one subject at a time to avoid overtaxing his impaired memory.

On Monday, six years after he first enrolled at Trinity College East, Khan walked across the school’s graduation stage as an honored member of the graduating class. The school extended a special invitation to Khan to participate in the ceremony, recognizing his years of grit and determination in the face of overwhelming obstacles.

Now 19, Khan is still working toward his next milestone: earning his full Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC). He already passed English last year and completed the Principles of Business exam this year, with mathematics planned for next year. His progress is slow, shaped by ongoing health challenges: he still attends regular cancer monitoring clinics, requires frequent blood tests to manage abnormal sodium levels and blood counts, and his short-term memory impairment makes studying a constant struggle. There are good days and bad days, and Khan sometimes feels discouraged by how long it takes him to reach his goals — but he remains committed to finishing what he started.

In an interview with the Express following his graduation, a smiling Khan shared that the ceremony marked his first ever graduation, and he had been looking forward to the milestone for months. For Adita, her son’s journey has been nothing short of a miracle. “My son was on death’s bed. He went to hell and back. He had many challenges, but he beat them all,” she said. The family now shares Aamir’s story to inspire other children and parents navigating similar health and educational struggles.

Speaking directly to young people facing learning and health challenges of their own, Khan offered a message of resilience: “I would tell children who are facing similar challenges, in my case and academically, to never give up even if you haven’t succeeded. Get back up and try again and again — because the moment you stop, then you’ve failed.” With a strong support system of family and friends surrounding him, Khan continues to push forward, turning what many would see as insurmountable odds into a series of hard-won victories.

A plan to bring back the Continuous Assessment Component (CAC) to Trinidad and Tobago’s primary education system has earned cautious backing from the nation’s largest teachers’ union and the national parent-teacher body, both of which warn that policy missteps that doomed the first iteration of the framework must be avoided for the initiative to deliver on its promises.

The Trinidad and Tobago Unified Teachers’ Association (TTUTA) first vice president Adesh Dwarika shared the union’s position in a recent phone interview with local outlet the Express, following the release of a memorandum from Education Ministry Chief Education Officer Peter Smith that launched virtual public consultations with primary school principals, teachers, and parents of Standards Two and Three students on the planned CAC relaunch.

Dwarika noted that TTUTA leadership held a meeting with Education Ministry officials several weeks prior to the consultation announcement, where Education Minister Dr Michael Dowlath confirmed the CAC would be returning to the national education system. The union had previously pushed for educator and administrator inclusion in consultation talks, a demand that has since been reflected in the ministry’s current outreach process.

“TTUTA has no objection to the policy if it genuinely strengthens the education system, enhances teaching and learning experiences for students, and reduces unnecessary pressure on young learners,” Dwarika explained. “But we cannot ignore the mistakes that led to its cancellation the first time around, and we must address those flaws up front.”

When CAC was first rolled out as part of the national Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA), it required teachers to deliver instruction in creative arts and a range of skill-based modules that many primary educators were not trained to teach, Dwarika said. A second critical flaw was the lack of standardized grading: assessments were scored independently at each school, leading to inconsistent, highly subjective results that undermined the credibility of the framework. The policy also created unmanageable additional workload for already stretched teaching staff, he added.

To fix these longstanding issues, TTUTA has proposed several key reforms ahead of the relaunch. Dwarika recommended rolling out a system of centralized grading moderation modeled after the School Based Assessment (SBA) process used for Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations, which would create consistent, fair grading standards across all schools. The union has also proposed reducing the weight of the final high-stakes SEA examination to offset the added workload of continuous assessment, framing the adjustment as a way to balance formative evaluation with systemwide accountability.

Dwarika emphasized that TTUTA’s demands are rooted in a commitment to improving outcomes for students and supporting educators, not opposing policy change. “We are not obstructionists. We want what is best for our students, who are our nation’s future, but we also need to protect our teachers from unfair emotional and physical burnout. Unreasonable burdens are the last thing any successful policy needs,” he said.

Walter Stewart, president of the National Parent Teacher Association (NPTA), echoed TTUTA’s cautious support in a statement shared via WhatsApp with the Express. Stewart noted that the current SEA framework relies entirely on a single high-stakes examination that only captures a student’s performance on one specific day, under high-pressure conditions. While the SEA provides useful data on a student’s academic readiness, it fails to capture the full range of a child’s creativity, talent and long-term potential, he argued.

“CAC will give us a more holistic portrait of a student’s achievement, growth and development over time, and will better highlight the skills and competencies that act as building blocks for long-term success,” Stewart said. Like TTUTA, Stewart stressed that the policy’s success hinges on three core prerequisites: clear national assessment standards, consistent and adequate teacher training, and transparent mechanisms to guarantee equity and fairness across all schools. Stewart added that the NPTA supports the framework because it centers student well-being, reduces unnecessary testing stress, and prioritizes meaningful learning over high-stakes performance.

As of press time, the Express reports that Education Minister Dr Michael Dowlath has not responded to requests for comment on the associations’ positions.

The current push to bring back CAC comes seven years after the policy was scrapped by the then-government in 2016. In April of that year, then Education Minister Anthony Garcia announced that the cohort of students sitting SEA that May would be the last to complete the CAC component. The cabinet’s decision followed a five-week national public consultation on education reform held earlier that year, which collected feedback through in-person public forums and online surveys. Consultation respondents widely criticized the original CAC as a poorly planned framework that placed unfair, undue stress on teachers, students and families, leading to its swift disbandment.

A fatal police shooting of a 38-year-old mentally ill man in San Juan has sparked deep grief and serious questions from his family, who say they called law enforcement to get him life-saving medical help, not a death sentence. Abraham Hackette, a longtime outpatient at St Ann’s Psychiatric Hospital, was shot and killed by officers on the evening of June 22 following a chaotic confrontation that left one police officer injured. What has intensified the family’s pain is the gaping mismatch between their account of the call for help and the official narrative released by police, alongside unanswered queries about why less-lethal force options were not used to subdue Hackette.

Hackette’s surviving sister, who requested anonymity to protect her family’s privacy, told local outlet the Express that the encounter began as a desperate plea for help. On Monday afternoon, Hackette became severely agitated during a mental health episode, armed himself with knives, and confronted a family member. Their mother, fearing for the safety of everyone in the home and neighborhood, placed an emergency call to police, asking officers to assist in transporting Hackette to the psychiatric hospital for care. The sister explained that their mother expected officers would sedate Hackette and move him to receive treatment, never anticipating the situation would end in her youngest brother’s death.

This was not Hackette’s first acute mental health crisis, his sister confirmed. The youngest of five siblings, Hackette had a history of mental illness that required institutional care: a previous episode that led to an assault on a relative resulted in his arrest, a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation at St Ann’s, and eventual discharge with ongoing medication to manage his condition. The sister emphasized that the entire family only wanted to get Hackette help on the day of the shooting, and no one foresaw the violence that would unfold. “Because he was having an episode. No one expected this to escalate to what happened,” she told reporters.

Official police reports lay out a different sequence of events. Just before 7 p.m. on June 22, two officers — WPC Nakhid and PC David Noel — responded to the disturbance call at Farroe Terrace, where the Hackette family lives. Upon arrival, the officers found Hackette, armed with two knives, being chased by a group of local men. He ran onto Saddle Road near Concord Road, where PC Noel exited his marked patrol vehicle and ordered Hackette to drop his weapons. When Hackette ignored the command and lunged at Noel, slashing the officer’s left hand and right arm.

Hackette then fled east along Concord Road, with both officers in pursuit, shouting repeated orders for him to surrender. During the chase, he attempted to attack PC Noel a second time, prompting the officer to fire one warning shot in Hackette’s direction. Hackette evaded officers by jumping a wall and hiding in dense brush near the San Juan River. While the injured PC Noel was transported to the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex (EWMSC) in Mt Hope for treatment, additional units from the San Juan CID and North Eastern Division Task Force launched a large-scale manhunt for Hackette.

Around 7:30 p.m., search teams spotted Hackette holding a 12-inch knife in a bushy trail near the river. Police say Hackette ignored multiple demands to drop his weapon, shouted “Ah go kill allyuh” (I will kill all of you), and continued advancing toward officers. Officers opened fire, striking Hackette multiple times. He was rushed to EWMSC in a police vehicle but was pronounced dead on arrival. PC Noel, the injured officer, was treated at the same hospital and remained in stable condition as of the family’s interview. Crime scene investigators later processed multiple locations connected to the incident and collected evidence for the ongoing investigation.

In the days after the shooting, the Hackette family says they have received almost no information from police about the details of the encounter, leaving them to grapple with grief and suspicion. Hackette’s sister questioned the use of deadly force against her brother, noting that he was a small man who did not pose an unavoidable lethal threat, even armed. Most pointedly, she asked why officers did not deploy less-lethal tools such as Tasers or pepper spray that could have disabled Hackette without killing him, even if officers felt threatened. “Why didn’t they try to shoot him in his foot or something to disable him and disarm him? The whole thing just doesn’t sit right with me,” she said, adding that she has little confidence that an internal investigation will yield accountability or answers for her family. The shooting has left the entire family traumatized, she added, and they are still struggling to process how a request for medical help ended in a young man’s death.

As a public service, the story included a resource note for community members facing mental health crisis: anyone experiencing a mental health emergency can contact the Ministry of Health’s free 24-hour National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-COPE (2673).