Carisa Lee

Re­porter

carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt

The Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty has re­ceived 32 more ap­pli­ca­tions on be­half of Venezue­lan mi­grant chil­dren seek­ing ap­proval to be ad­mit­ted in­to lo­cal schools.

Chief Ex­ec­u­tive Of­fi­cer (CEO) of the Catholic Ed­u­ca­tion Board of Man­age­ment, Sharon Man­groo, said yes­ter­day that they ex­pect to get that batch back in ap­prox­i­mate­ly two weeks.

“They will con­tin­ue to send, so it’s on­go­ing,” she said.

At a joint me­dia con­fer­ence on Mon­day, the Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty and Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istries an­nounced that 23 out of the suc­cess­ful 111 mi­grant chil­dren will start school next month. How­ev­er, Venezue­lan ac­tivist and co-founder of the Caribbean Kids and Fam­i­lies Ther­a­py Or­gan­i­sa­tion (CK­FTO), Sofia Figueroa-Leon, said 23 was too small a num­ber.

CK­FTO is a non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tion that helps train teach­ers to work with mi­grant chil­dren.

Figueroa-Leon wants to know what be­came of the orig­i­nal 200 stu­dents ear­marked to be ad­mit­ted to lo­cal schools and how quick­ly the turnover of the ap­pli­ca­tions will take.

“In my hum­ble opin­ion, this whole sys­tem has been poor­ly thought out,” she said.

She said while it was good that 23 chil­dren would be at­tend­ing school in Sep­tem­ber, she could not un­der­stand why the pro­ce­dure was so slow.

“Ed­u­ca­tion is a hu­man right. Re­gard­less of race, creed, na­tion­al­i­ty, every child has a right to an ed­u­ca­tion,” Figueroa-Leon said.

How­ev­er, La Ro­main Mi­grant Sup­port Group co­or­di­na­tor Ang­ie Ram­nar­ine said she was not sur­prised on­ly 23 mi­grant chil­dren were ac­cept­ed giv­en the cri­te­ria the min­istries re­quest­ed.

“In a way, it’s a small bat­tle won, the war has not been won but a bat­tle has been,” she said.

Dur­ing the me­dia con­fer­ence on Mon­day, Chief Ed­u­ca­tion Of­fi­cer Dr Pe­ter Smith said they faced chal­lenges with the ap­pli­ca­tion process, such as miss­ing doc­u­ments, the lan­guage bar­ri­er, and ex­pired per­mits, which de­layed the process.

Ram­nar­ine said they will con­tin­ue to run learn­ing cen­tres and de­pend on fund­ing, al­though it’s a strug­gle to en­sure no Venezue­lan mi­grant child is left be­hind.