Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Nyan Gadb­sy-Dol­ly heaped praise on the Chin­maya Vidyalaya dur­ing the in­au­gu­ra­tion of its new Sant Tul­si­das Cam­pus yes­ter­day.

De­liv­er­ing the fea­ture ad­dress at the cam­pus in McBean, Cou­va, Gads­by-Dol­ly laud­ed the school’s progress from its in­cep­tion in 2003 with just sev­en stu­dents.

Now, the school boasts of be­ing the most tech­nol­o­gy-ad­vanced cam­pus in T&T, which can cater to 800 pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary school stu­dents. Gads­by-Dol­ly said the cam­pus was a bea­con that the Vidyalaya should be proud of be­cause what it boasts would be the most ad­vanced tech­no­log­i­cal equip­ment to en­able learn­ing.

“I can tell you that when I looked at some of the equip­ment in the labs, I felt so proud and hap­py for the chil­dren who will be able to ben­e­fit from such an ed­u­ca­tion. I can say to you that this school, born out of what peo­ple saw as the gaps in the ex­ist­ing pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem, there is space for more schools like this all over the coun­try,” Gads­by-Dol­ly said.

She ac­knowl­edged that Chin­maya was a pri­vate­ly fund­ed school, so not every­one would have ac­cess. There­fore, she said the Gov­ern­ment’s role in pro­vid­ing eq­ui­table ed­u­ca­tion is to en­sure the gaps be­tween pri­vate and pub­lic are not too wide.

The Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter not­ed that the COVID-19 ex­pe­ri­ence showed the im­por­tance of in­cor­po­rat­ing tech­nol­o­gy in the school sys­tem to en­sure stu­dents’ ed­u­ca­tion con­tin­ued to progress.

“I wish it were so easy for us to do some of the things you have done, but the sys­tem is not so. But that does not mean you do not set your goals in the pub­lic sys­tem, just as you have done at Chin­maya.”

Head of the Vidyalaya and prin­ci­pal Swami­ji said de­spite re­plac­ing chalks and dusters with smart boards along­side oth­er fea­tures, there is al­so en­vi­ron­men­tal con­scious­ness. Among the en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly fea­tures un­der­way is an iso­lat­ed flush­ing sys­tem for wa­ter har­vest­ing and a plan to use so­lar pow­er for most of the cam­pus.

The school con­struc­tion and out­fit­ting cost $30 mil­lion. The Vidyalaya has al­ready paid $24 mil­lion and Swami­ji said they would pay the re­main­ing $6 mil­lion short­ly. What sep­a­rates Chin­maya’s ed­u­ca­tion from oth­ers is that apart from im­part­ing sec­u­lar knowl­edge, there is an el­e­ment of spir­i­tu­al, moral, and val­ue-based ed­u­ca­tion.

Phase 1 of the school project was to com­plete and in­au­gu­rate the cam­pus. Class­room wings pos­sess SMART tech­nol­o­gy, with state-of-the-art au­dio-vi­su­al spaces, a li­brary, sci­ence labs, mu­sic and art spaces, phys­i­cal and men­tal well-be­ing spaces, gym­na­si­um and yo­ga fa­cil­i­ties. Each class­room at the cam­pus has a 75” in­ter­ac­tive Smart dig­i­tal board, which re­places the tra­di­tion­al black and white boards.