Naps Girls rally around ‘Yvee’

Miss TT/Universe title holder Yvonne Clarke. PHOTO BY ANGELO MARCELLE
Miss TT/Universe title holder Yvonne Clarke. PHOTO BY ANGELO MARCELLE

CARLA BRIDGLAL

Naparima Girls’ High School is in full support of former alumna Yvonne Clarke who was stripped Tuesday of her Miss T&T Universe title for an alleged breach of contract, one of Clarke’s former teachers has said.

“The support has always been tremendous (even before she won). Now that this has happened, it is even more tremendous because all the girls feel personally insulted,” Naomi Woodsley told Newsday.

Clarke has been treated “most unfairly,” she added. Clarke graduated from the institution, often billed as the top secondary school in the country, in 2008.

Woodsley said she had been “Team Yvee” from day one and had been instrumental in rallying and co-ordinating the troops that came out to support Clarke.

She said, staff and students, present and past, had all been rallying hard. One past student, Nicole Francis-Carter, said that even though she and Clarke were not in the same year, the bond of sisterhood was still strong.

“As a fellow Naps girl and even knowing her personally, she didn’t have the easiest of journeys, and this has been something she has always wanted. I was very proud to hear she was competing and eventually won,” Francis-Carter said. It is Clarke’s fighting spirit that inspired Francis-Carter to lobby her former classmates to raise funds for Clarke to mount a legal challenge against her dismissal. Hollie Charles, Clarke’s former classmate, was also supportive.

“I know she’s been preparing for this actively about a year now but she has been talking about being Miss Universe for a very long time. I’ve seen her progress from Miss Naps, to Miss Point Fortin to Miss Trinidad and Tobago,” Charles said, adding that she even went to see Clarke compete at the local pageant on October 20 at the Chaguaramas Convention Centre, where the Miss Universe Pageant was held in 1999.

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"Naps Girls rally around ‘Yvee’"

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