Resh­ma Ra­goonath

A to­tal of 3,300 of the 21,500 Leno­vo Thinkpad lap­tops bought by the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment, at a cost of $58 mil­lion, will be shipped to St Lu­cia as part of a gov­ern­ment-to-gov­ern­ment Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MoU), Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh said yes­ter­day.

He made the com­ment dur­ing a tele­phone in­ter­view in re­sponse to ques­tions as to why Gov­ern­ment had pur­chased a few thou­sand more com­put­ers for dis­tri­b­u­tion to the stu­dents who had sat Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) ex­am this year.He said the agree­ment was the cul­mi­na­tion of dis­cus­sions be­tween the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry and St Lu­cian Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Robert Kennedy Joseph.He said Joseph will ar­rive next week to sign the MOU for the re­pay­ment of $7.9 mil­lion for the ex­tra lap­tops.

While Gopeesingh could not give a date of re­pay­ment of the mon­ey for the lap­tops, he was con­fi­dent it would be "paid back very quick­ly."He said Joseph in­tend­ed to dis­trib­ute the 3,300 lap­tops to Fourth Form stu­dents in St Lu­cia. He said his min­istry would be pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal sup­port to St Lu­cia for its lap­top pro­gramme. He said he al­so had of­fered to pro­vide teacher-train­ing to the St Lu­cian Gov­ern­ment.

Gopeesingh said the new lap­tops for this year's dis­tri­b­u­tion have been pur­chased at a cost of $2,400 each, which he said was a sav­ing of $450 a unit.He said at the end of this year, 70,000 lap­tops would have been dis­trib­uted to sec­ondary school stu­dents from Form One to Form Four.Gopeesingh added all prin­ci­pals at pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary school lev­els and school su­per­vi­sors have re­ceived lap­tops.

He said the min­istry was al­so close to es­tab­lish­ing In­for­ma­tion Com­put­er Tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) link­ages with teach­ers, prin­ci­pals and the min­istry.The min­is­ter added ten­ders would be sent out for the in­stal­la­tion of In­ter­net and Wifi pro­vi­sions at schools. He said all sec­ondary schools have one to six com­put­er labs and the 476 pri­ma­ry schools each have com­put­er labs.Gopeesingh added that 4,000 teach­ers at vary­ing lev­els have been trained in the in­fu­sion of the cur­ricu­lum with ICT.

He said T&T's lap­top pro­gramme had ranked the coun­try among top coun­tries in­te­grat­ing IT with ed­u­ca­tion.Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry me­dia re­la­tions co-or­di­na­tor Yolan­da Morales-Car­val­ho, speak­ing with the T&T Guardian in a tele­phone in­ter­view, as­sured all 18,000 stu­dents who sat the SEA would re­ceive their new lap­tops, the first batch of which are ex­pect­ed to be­gin ar­riv­ing next week, be­fore the units ear­marked for St Lu­cia were shipped.

She added: "The 21,500 in­clud­ed 3,300 lap­tops which we have pur­chased for the Gov­ern­ment of St Lu­cia and the agree­ment is that they are go­ing to pay back their amount."We ben­e­fit­ted from the pur­chase. We were buy­ing in more vol­ume so the price was bet­ter," Morales-Car­val­ho said.