Following the release of the 2021 SEA results, excited parents are experiencing anxiety and worry as they are now met with exorbitant school fees in order to register their children for secondary school.
According to alleged lists from various schools circulating on social media since early Friday morning, there were fees for uniform material, school development in the sum of, as much as $600, and for physical education uniforms.
Speaking with the Guardian Media yesterday, Clarence Mendoza, head of the Concerned Parents Movement of T&T said that the exorbitant fees is nothing new and was something that would have started since last year during the registration process of Form One pupils.
Mendoza blamed the lack of disbursement of the necessary funding by the Ministry of Education for the operational expenses of schools.
“The Ministry of Education, in its tardiness, if in so much of a word, the ministry did not get around to facilitating these schools with the necessary needed funds for the daily preparation of the schools including sanitisation of the schools and we are seeing the same thing here in 2021,” Mendoza said.
“Some of the principals would have raised that bar in order to collect a little extra to purchase bleach and other cleaning agents and for printing, printers and so forth,” he added.
Mendoza said though he personally visited several schools yesterday and saw for himself efforts by some of the principals to waive or decrease portions of the fees to ease the financial burden on parents.
“In the Victoria and South-Eastern regions, they would have to drop some fees. Who was charging $500 is now charging $300 and who were charging physical education (PE) fees saw it as irrelevant at this point so the PE shirts and so forth that they would have charged the parents for, they would have been stroked off the list.”
Mendoza said he wrote to the Minister of Education in the past and plans to do so again about the issue of funding.
When contacted for a comment, Association of Principals of Public Secondary Schools of T&T president Sherra Carrington-James said she was not aware of the issue and therefore could not comment.