Akash Sama­roo

The Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion, Re­search and Tech­nol­o­gy in the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) is promis­ing To­bag­o­ni­ans that all schools will at least have the ba­sic ameni­ties come Feb­ru­ary 7.

The as­sur­ance came from the Di­vi­sion’s As­sis­tant Sec­re­tary, Or­lan­do Kerr who said while de­bate on the lo­gis­tics of re­open­ing is on­go­ing, “the re­al­i­ty is come the 7th of Feb­ru­ary our schools will be open, whether we agree with the sit­u­a­tion or not.”

But speak­ing at the THA’s Post-Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil Brief­ing, Kerr said one ma­jor is­sue fac­ing the di­vi­sion is the in­fra­struc­tur­al readi­ness of the schools.

“Our pri­ma­ry schools would have been closed for al­most two years. It means that many of those build­ings will be with­out per­sons oc­cu­py­ing them, there was no va­ca­tion re­pair pro­gram in 2021 on those build­ings and would lead to fur­ther prob­lems.”

Kerr said the Ed­u­ca­tion Di­vi­sion will be part­ner­ing with the Di­vi­sion of Works and a team will be vis­it­ing all pri­ma­ry schools to as­cer­tain what up­grades are need­ed.

“We have age­ing in­fra­struc­ture, many of our schools are as old as I am and there­fore, we all know the chal­lenges.”

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tion had pre­vi­ous­ly raised con­cerns about in­fra­struc­ture and said that the schools need­ed more time to pre­pare.

Kerr said he is very cog­nizant of that, he un­der­stands it will be a huge and cost­ly chal­lenge but at least the ba­sic ameni­ties will be there for the chil­dren.

“What we are aim­ing to do is to en­sure that every school has the ba­sics, so light­ing, elec­tri­cal, wa­ter, plumb­ing will be up to date and to en­sure the en­vi­ron­ment is safe and clean for our stu­dents.”

Kerr said this is the short-term goal and he’s hop­ing that when the Ju­ly/Au­gust va­ca­tion pe­ri­od comes this year, more mean­ing­ful re­pair work will be done.

Mean­while, Kerr sought to as­sure par­ents of stu­dents that all nec­es­sary sani­tis­ing sta­tions will be op­er­a­tional.

He re­vealed yes­ter­day that the Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion is cur­rent­ly set­ting up a health unit that will ex­clu­sive­ly cater to stu­dents who fall ill dur­ing class­es.

“That unit will com­prise of a doc­tor, nurs­es and oth­er sup­port staff, it is not com­plete at this time but we are hop­ing to have that done as soon as pos­si­ble, we recog­nise that there is a need for that as part of our COVID-19 re­sponse be­cause once schools re­open there will be in­ci­dents of COVID-19 and we must have a prop­er re­sponse and our health pro­fes­sion­als are part of that.”