Rhon­dor Dowlat

Pupils who will be en­ter­ing Form One in sec­ondary schools in the new school term, which opens on Sep­tem­ber 5, will face dis­ap­point­ment as they will not be re­ceiv­ing free per­son­al lap­tops from the Gov­ern­ment.

In­stead, the Gov­ern­ment, in re­vamp­ing the lap­top dis­tri­b­u­tion pro­gramme, will seek to equip 50 high-qual­i­ty lap­tops per school.

This was yes­ter­day re­vealed by Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia dur­ing a press con­fer­ence at the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, in St Clair.

Gar­cia said that the new pol­i­cy was a ma­jor de­par­ture from the prac­tice of the for­mer gov­ern­ment–the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment–which a study con­duct­ed showed was waste­ful and counter-pro­duc­tive.

Gar­cia dis­closed that 12,600 lap­tops will be pur­chased for use by Form One and Two stu­dents, "of that 6,300 will be for the use of Form One's and 6,300 for Form Two's. 50 lap­tops will be used by Form One's in each sec­ondary school and they would not be giv­en as per­son­al lap­tops but rather the lap­tops will be as prop­er­ty of the schools."

Gar­cia al­so dis­closed that In­ter­net ac­cess in the schools will be up­grad­ed and teacher train­ing in ICT will be in­tro­duced.

"This new pol­i­cy will pre­vent waste that oc­curred over the last five years as it was proven that the lap­tops were main­ly used by the stu­dents for the play­ing of games and record­ing of fights be­cause there was no avail­abil­i­ty of con­nec­tiv­i­ty to the In­ter­net, which in oth­er words proved to be counter-pro­duc­tive," Gar­cia said.

"We are en­sur­ing val­ue for mon­ey and en­sur­ing that the lap­tops be put to the cor­rect use," he said.

When asked how much mon­ey the Gov­ern­ment will be sav­ing now that the pro­gramme has been re­vamped, Gar­cia said ap­prox­i­mate­ly $30 mil­lion a year. He claimed that un­der the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment a lap­top cost be­tween $12,000 to $15,000 and un­der the new ini­tia­tive it will on­ly cost the Gov­ern­ment $4,135.79 each. He said that the over­all the cost of the re­vamped pro­gramme will be in the tune of $62 mil­lion, as op­posed to the last gov­ern­ment spend­ing in ex­cess of $500 mil­lion on the same ini­tia­tive.

Op­po­si­tion con­demns move

In re­sponse to Gar­cia's an­nounce­ment, for­mer Ed­u­ca­tion min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh dis­put­ed the fig­ures dis­closed by Gar­cia.

"Al­to­geth­er we would have spent $250 mil­lion for the five years. We, through the Cen­tral Ten­ders Board, in the first year pur­chased a unit for $4,200 and by 2015, we were pur­chas­ing per lap­top at $2,200," Gopeesingh said.

"And these lap­tops were of high qual­i­ty. When I came in I met con­nec­tiv­i­ty in schools at some de­gree and that was im­proved from five megabytes to 100 megabytes," he said.

Gopeesingh al­so claimed that each sec­ondary school had be­tween one and six com­put­er labs, where one lab av­er­aged about 60 com­put­ers.

"I think that the Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion is be­ing mis­chie­vous there in his fig­ures and should be re­lieved of his re­spon­si­bil­i­ties be­cause he has car­ried the ed­u­ca­tion process back by 20 years in just one year," Gopeesingh said.

Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar de­scribed the de­ci­sion as an­oth­er ex­am­ple of the Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion not un­der­stand­ing the ben­e­fits of in­vest­ing in ed­u­ca­tion. Speak­ing to CNC3 last night, Per­sad-Bisses­sar said the new pol­i­cy al­so lim­its de­vel­op­ment of the coun­try.

She al­so ques­tioned what hap­pened to the lap­tops bought for dis­tri­b­u­tion last year.