PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Af­ter six weeks of not know­ing if their chil­dren will have class­es, par­ents of stu­dents at Barataria North Sec­ondary protest­ed out­side the school yes­ter­day. The school has not of­fi­cial­ly been closed but teach­ers have not held class­es due to con­cerns about in­sect and ro­dent in­fes­ta­tions.

“We are here be­cause we can­not get clar­i­ty. We not get­ting clar­i­ty from the school, we not get­ting clar­i­ty from the min­is­ter, we not get­ting clar­i­ty from the dis­trict of­fice for this area as to why and when we will have school,” said Jack­ie Joseph, the par­ent of a Form One stu­dent.

“We have chil­dren who are go­ing to do NESC just now. We have chil­dren who go­ing to the May/June CXC ex­ams who have SBAs that they have to sub­mit. And they not able to do any of those things. Be­cause of the myr­i­ad of prob­lems that we have at this school.”

Min­istry of­fi­cials said they sent per­son­nel from the In­sect Vec­tor Unit to the school and col­lab­o­rat­ed with the San Juan Laven­tille Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion to fu­mi­gate the build­ing. How­ev­er even be­fore this ac­tion was tak­en, the build­ing had not been of­fi­cial­ly deemed a health risk un­der the Oc­cu­pa­tion­al Health and Safe­ty Act. Be­cause of this, the school was not closed.

De­spite the fu­mi­ga­tion, com­plaints from staff and stu­dents have per­sist­ed.

“My son came home with flea bites on his skin, I had to get med­ica­tion for him. We stand up out­side the school now look­ing for an­swers from the prin­ci­pal, from the min­is­ter,” said Deb­bie Hare­wood, an­oth­er Form One par­ent.

“This is un­fair to us. Six weeks our chil­dren are home with­out school. My son frus­trat­ed, all my son do­ing is sleep­ing, he sleep­ing!”

TTUTA pres­i­dent An­to­nia Tekah-De Fre­itas con­firmed that the min­istry sent teams to spray the school but there con­tin­ued to be com­plaints.

“This has been go­ing on for a cou­ple of weeks. The thing is the Min­istry would have made re­peat­ed at­tempts to have the place sani­tised and so forth over the last few weeks. The fact of the mat­ter is when both the stu­dents and teach­ers oc­cu­py the com­pound all par­ties are bit­ten from time to time,” she said.

De Fre­itas said she is await­ing in­for­ma­tion from her staff rep­re­sen­ta­tive about the is­sue at the school. She said the union made a sug­ges­tion to the min­istry ear­li­er this week.

“I am not sure whether the protest is di­rect­ed prop­er­ly. The min­istry has to take ac­tion to deal with the mat­ter. When we met the Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary on Ash Wednes­day, we sug­gest­ed to him that there are struc­tures on the com­pound that could be per­haps could be sani­tised as well to re­move what­ev­er could be there. It’s up to the min­istry to look in­to it and treat it ac­cord­ing­ly,” she said.

Dur­ing yes­ter­day’s protest, po­lice of­fi­cers came to speak to par­ents as they had not of­fi­cial­ly ap­plied for per­mis­sion to protest, an­ger­ing the par­ents fur­ther.

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia said his min­istry sought help from the Min­istry of Health to help iden­ti­fy the source of the prob­lem.

“They can’t seem to de­ter­mine the ori­gin of the fleas be­cause the place has been sani­tised, sprayed and so on,” he said.

Gar­cia said they are now look­ing in­to whether the prob­lem orig­i­nat­ed out­side the school.