Gail Alexan­der

While Gov­ern­ment has not yet spent any funds to re­pair lap­tops giv­en to sec­ondary school stu­dents, $10 mil­lion will be spent this year to is­sue ten­ders for re­pairs and main­te­nance, plus ex­ten­sion of war­ranties, says Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh.Speak­ing in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day, Gopeesingh said con­sid­er­a­tion was be­ing giv­en to seek­ing war­ran­ty ex­ten­sion for the lap­tops from one year to three years.Gov­ern­ment has sup­plied 73,200 lap­tops to stu­dents from 2010 to 2013 at a cost of $253 mil­lion, he added.

He said by Sep­tem­ber, Gov­ern­ment would have sup­plied stu­dents at Forms One, Two, Three, Four and Five with 92,000 lap­tops.Gopeesingh said 150 in­for­ma­tion com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) per­son­nel at the min­istry cur­rent­ly ser­vice lap­tops and no mon­ey had been paid to re­pair the equip­ment. He said some com­put­ers have sus­tained wa­ter dam­age or cracked screens.

He said Cab­i­net had ap­proved spend­ing of $10 mil­lion to ten­der for a com­pa­ny to do re­pairs on non-func­tion­ing com­put­ers and main­te­nance as well as the war­ran­ty ex­ten­sion.He was un­able to say how many were not work­ing. The min­istry would be look­ing at both lo­cal and in­ter­na­tion­al com­pa­nies re­gard­ing re­pairs, he added.Gopeesingh said the lap­top ini­tia­tive was among the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship's (PP) ful­filled promis­es. Last Sat­ur­day, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar said the PP had ful­filled 252 of its 260 promis­es.

Yes­ter­day, Gopeesingh said Gov­ern­ment had, over­all, in­vest­ed $500 mil­lion in tools, with the lap­top cost, and oth­er equip­ment cost­ing $250 mil­lion for stu­dents.He said lap­tops were pro­vid­ed by Hewlett Packard in 2010 and 2012 and Leno­vo in 2011 and 2013. Cost for Gov­ern­ment has dropped from $4,100 a unit to ap­prox­i­mate­ly $3,000 each.Ten­der­ing was un­der I-Gov TT for the first few years but due to de­lays, it was done in 2013 un­der the Cen­tral Ten­ders Board for trans­paren­cy, he added.

Gov­ern­ment T&T stu­dents would re­ceive 18,500 lap­tops and 1,500 al­so would be pro­vid­ed to pri­ma­ry school teach­ers, Gopeesingh said. He said the equip­ment would aid teach­ers to use a more sci­en­tif­ic thrust to plan work.Gopeesingh said the min­istry had au­dit­ed the suc­cess of the lap­top ini­tia­tive, in­clud­ing how many stu­dents brought them to school and used them and that had at­test­ed to its "big suc­cess."

He said Sam­sung had part­nered al­so with TSTT to launch its tablet prod­uct for the smart-class­room ini­tia­tive, which the min­istry was pi­o­neer­ing and which would al­so be taught to re­gion­al and Latin Amer­i­can states.Gopeesingh said he al­so had talks with 30 pub­lish­ers on plans for elec­tron­ic text­books, on-line.He con­grat­u­lat­ed win­ners of the Pres­i­dent's Medal pro­gramme, not­ing it was held for the first time in To­ba­go re­cent­ly.

He said the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly's Chief Sec­re­tary was hap­py at the event. Gopeesingh was al­so con­grat­u­lat­ed yes­ter­day on the ef­fort by In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor Ayesha Ed­wards.Gopeesingh said US Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton, at a re­cent IDB con­fer­ence, sin­gled out T&T's ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem for praise, not­ing it was "seam­less."