Richard?Lord

With Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar set to have cru­cial face-to-face talks on crime to­mor­row, for­mer prin­ci­pal Justin Paul has sug­gest­ed the for­mer shift sys­tem which op­er­at­ed at ju­nior sec­ondary schools for sev­er­al years may be a ma­jor cause of the se­ri­ous prob­lem fac­ing the coun­try to­day.

Paul, one of the re­cip­i­ents of Cha­co­nia Medal Gold for long and mer­i­to­ri­ous ser­vice to T&T, is a for­mer prin­ci­pal of San Fer­nan­do Tech­ni­cal In­sti­tute, Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary in the Min­istries of Ed­u­ca­tion and Works and Trans­port and once served as di­rec­tor of Tech­ni­cal Vo­ca­tion­al Ed­u­ca­tion and Train­ing. He said in a brief in­ter­view af­ter re­ceiv­ing his award at Queen's Hall yes­ter­day evening that he es­tab­lished YTEPP and on-the-job train­ing across the coun­try.

While he did not think the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem was fail­ing the na­tion, Paul said the crime prob­lem may be the re­sult of stu­dents com­ing out of the dis­band­ed ju­nior sec­ondary school sys­tem, which op­er­at­ed a shift sys­tem which al­lowed thou­sands of stu­dents to be away from class­es for half the day when many of them en­gaged in non-school ac­tiv­i­ties.

"That was part of my con­cern. Half-day school may have en­cour­aged some of that ac­tiv­i­ty to cause us to now have a num­ber of young peo­ple in­volved in crime," he said, adding that the sit­u­a­tion may be chang­ing as schools now run for a full sev­en hours.

An­oth­er re­cip­i­ent of the Cha­co­nia Medal Gold, for­mer THA As­sem­bly­man William Mc Ken­zie said he was hap­py to have re­ceived the award which he ac­cept­ed in ho­n­our of his late moth­er who al­ways made sure he was ac­count­able for his ac­tions. He was the lone PNM mem­ber of the THA for sev­er­al years when it was con­trolled by the Na­tion­al Al­liance for Re­con­struc­tion (NAR) led by Arthur NP Robin­son.

Kei­th Camp­bell, a forester who died dur­ing bat­tling a bush fire in St Ann's, was award­ed the Hum­ming Bird Medal Bronze posthu­mous­ly for gal­lantry. His broth­er Ken­rick said that it was "a good, but bad that it hap­pen in this way." He how­ev­er thanked the Gov­ern­ment for the award, adding that his broth­er would have ap­pre­ci­at­ed it. He said his broth­er was "a hard work­er and he loved do­ing what he did."

Ca­lyp­son­ian Scrunter (Ir­win John­son Scrunter) ex­pressed his joy and re­ceiv­ing an award by hug­ging Prime Min­is­ter Row­ley. He lat­er ex­pressed con­cern that the lo­cal mu­sic in­dus­try was dy­ing be­cause of pira­cy which was caus­ing artistes to suf­fer fi­nan­cial loss­es. He called for the law to be en­forced to en­sure mu­sic pi­rates were pros­e­cut­ed.