PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Par­ents of stu­dents at the Curepe Pres­by­ter­ian School are wel­com­ing news that re­fur­bish­ment work on a long-aban­doned school build­ing will soon be­gin.

The build­ing had been con­struct­ed un­der the Peo­ple’s Part­ner­ship gov­ern­ment but was not com­plet­ed and had be­come over­grown with wild vines and weeds.

Mem­bers of the school’s Par­ent Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (PTA) em­barked on a clean-up ex­er­cise at the build­ing yes­ter­day, where they were joined by St Au­gus­tine MP and Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Khadi­jah Ameen and Curepe/Pasea coun­cil­lor J-Lynn Roop­nar­ine.

“The Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion an­nounced at a post-Cab­i­net meet­ing that they will have a school re­pair pro­gram for the Ju­ly–Au­gust pe­ri­od, and the Curepe Pres­by­ter­ian School has been list­ed for part of that re­pair,” said Ameen.

“While our stu­dents re­main in the cur­rent fa­cil­i­ty, which is in­fest­ed with pi­geons. The sew­er sys­tem is giv­ing prob­lems, you have rats and so on. The stu­dents there are cramped in the class­rooms. We have the stu­dent block on this side that is in need of re­pair. Well, it is an en­tire re­fur­bish­ment need­ed.”

Ameen said the re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tion had pro­vid­ed as­sis­tance, with trucks and chain­saws be­ing made avail­able for the ef­fort.

“This ex­er­cise, as I said, has been long in com­ing be­cause we’ve been ad­vo­cat­ing over and over. We’re writ­ing let­ters. We’ve been lob­by­ing. We try to get this ed­i­fice, won­der­ful ed­i­fice it is, com­plet­ed, and so we were pre­pared to move heav­en and earth to get this done, um, no mat­ter who’s in pow­er. So we are grate­ful that we don’t have to push too hard. We’re ex­treme­ly grate­ful that we don’t have to work so hard to get this done,” said at­tor­ney Ken­neth Mon­roe Brown, who is the chair­man of the PTA’s in­fra­struc­ture and build­ing com­mit­tee.

Act­ing school prin­ci­pal Pa­tri­cia Thomp­son Jag­ger­nauth was al­so grate­ful that there were plans to use the build­ing.

Par­ents al­so in­formed Guardian Me­dia that the school’s au­di­to­ri­um, which was of­fi­cial­ly com­mis­sioned in June 2024, had been bro­ken in­to sev­er­al times in re­cent weeks. Thieves stole lights and light­ing fix­tures, tiles, and at­tempt­ed to pull down LED lights that had been in­stalled in the build­ing.

Ameen con­firmed that she had re­ceived such re­ports.

“In the last three weeks or so, we have had sev­er­al break-ins here. In fact, there’s a ban­dit that we don’t know if he was liv­ing part-time in part of the struc­ture. They would have stolen more things. They stole tiles off the walls, the elec­tri­cal pulling it through the walls, the win­dows out of the frames, and sev­er­al things,” she said.