Akash Sama­roo and

Renu­ka Singh

Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly said yes­ter­day that vir­tu­al class­es will con­tin­ue when the new school term starts on Sep­tem­ber 6, while the min­istry and the Gov­ern­ment look at how many stu­dents re­ceived vac­cines.

“We will look close­ly at the vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme over the next few days as we de­ter­mine who can be brought back phys­i­cal­ly, but our stu­dents should start school vir­tu­al­ly come Sep­tem­ber 6th,” Gads­by-Dol­ly said while speak­ing at the com­mis­sion­ing of the San Juan Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School.

The Gov­ern­ment is al­so self-fund­ing a $4 bil­lion school con­struc­tion pro­gramme. Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley re­vealed some de­tails of the pro­gramme at the event.

Dur­ing his con­tri­bu­tion, Row­ley said the Gov­ern­ment’s school con­struc­tion was stymied by the loss of the two dry sea­sons be­cause of the COVID-19 shut­down, adding that de­spite the chal­lenges, the Gov­ern­ment and the Na­tion­al Main­te­nance Train­ing and Se­cu­ri­ty Com­pa­ny (MTS) was “plod­ding through a ma­jor school con­struc­tion pro­gramme across the coun­try.”

He said whichev­er gov­ern­ment was in pow­er had to deal with those type of fig­ures.

“But this pro­gramme that we are en­gaged in now is one that is fund­ed di­rect­ly out of the cash flow of the State and that is where the dif­fi­cul­ty lies,” he said.

“A $4 bil­lion pro­gramme be­ing fund­ed out of the cash flow.”

There are ap­prox­i­mate­ly 600 schools through­out the is­lands and while some schools be­long to de­nom­i­na­tion­al bod­ies, the ma­jor­i­ty are un­der the re­mit of the State.

Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment for the area, Sad­dam Hus­sein, was al­so present at the event and talked about his dis­ap­point­ment that the build­ing took so long to be de­liv­ered.

The Prime Min­is­ter ad­dressed that mat­ter.

He said that the de­liv­ery was based on cost and the cir­cum­stances of the build­ing it­self.

“Over the years, we have sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly, some­times slow­ly, some­times more rapid­ly de­pend­ing on the cir­cum­stances of the in­di­vid­ual school­house and al­so the coun­try’s abil­i­ty to re­place all of them with fa­cil­i­ties of this na­ture,” he said.

He cit­ed his own con­stituen­cy, where the con­struc­tion of the pri­ma­ry school took a long time and some­times some schools need­ed more at­ten­tion than oth­ers and pri­or­i­ties had to be shift­ed.

“All gov­ern­ments face that. So when you talk about dis­ap­point­ments in de­lays, I want you to see the over­all per­spec­tive,” Row­ley said.

The Prime Min­is­ter said that in pre­vi­ous ad­min­is­tra­tions, there was an at­tempt to “get it all done at once.”

“And we are in fact op­er­at­ing a pro­gramme now where al­most 100 schools are con­tract­ed out to be built at about the same time. That was a huge un­der­tak­ing with some sig­nif­i­cant com­pli­ca­tions, not the least of which is fund­ing,” he said.

Row­ley said that this pro­gramme to de­liv­er schools is not tied to any par­tic­u­lar fund­ing pro­gramme and is be­ing fi­nanced by the State.

“What used to hap­pen be­fore, be­cause of the ex­pense in­volved in build­ing a school, far less a pack­age of schools, is that the State would seek long-term fund­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly with the sec­ondary schools,” he said.

The Prime Min­is­ter said while pri­ma­ry schools av­er­aged around $20 mil­lion, the av­er­age sec­ondary school cost up­wards of $200 mil­lion.

“In the pro­gramme I just men­tioned, there are one or two schools, one in par­tic­u­lar which is on the hori­zon in the pro­gramme, where the orig­i­nal es­ti­mate we are look­ing at is $288 mil­lion,” he said.

“So if you get any com­plaints from any­body, un­der­stand the dif­fi­cul­ty that the Gov­ern­ment has in fund­ing every­thing else that needs to be fund­ed while at the same time find­ing suf­fi­cient cash in the dai­ly, month­ly, week­ly, year­ly cash flow to fund these pro­grammes.”

Just last week, Row­ley spoke at the open­ing of the Chatham Pri­ma­ry School and he is ex­pect­ed to speak at a sim­i­lar school open­ing in Mal­abar on Thurs­day.

The new San Juan Gov­ern­ment build­ing con­tains four blocks, 19 class­rooms, an au­dio/vi­su­al room, com­put­er lab, mu­sic room and sci­ence lab. It can hold 420 stu­dents.