Thou­sands of mi­grant chil­dren in T&T should be giv­en the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ac­cess an ed­u­ca­tion, says Co-or­di­na­tor of the La Ro­maine Mi­grant Sup­port Group Ang­ie Ram­nar­ine. The call came af­ter Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar raised the is­sue of the chil­dren's ed­u­ca­tion at the Mon­day Night Fo­rum two weeks ago.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar, ad­dress­ing the Gov­ern­ment, said, "You ac­cept­ed them and gave them li­cence to stay in T&T. It is about time we al­low these chil­dren to en­ter our pub­lic school sys­tem to get an ed­u­ca­tion."

In 2019, 16, 523 Venezue­lan mi­grants were al­lowed to legal­ly work in T&T and since then they have been giv­en ex­ten­sions to legal­ly work and live here.

Ac­cord­ing to the Unit­ed Na­tions High Com­mis­sion­er for Refugees (UN­HCR) da­ta, there are just over 4,000 chil­dren, be­tween the ages of five and 17 years, among the asy­lum seek­ers and refugees reg­is­tered with the UN­HCR in T&T.

How­ev­er, un­der the Equal Place Pro­gramme–an on­line ed­u­ca­tion ini­tia­tive im­ple­ment­ed by the Liv­ing Wa­ter Com­mu­ni­ty in T&T for mi­grants in 2019 as a tem­po­rary so­lu­tion from the Unit­ed Na­tions In­ter­na­tion­al Chil­dren's Emer­gency Fund (UNICEF)–on­ly 1,662 mi­grant chil­dren have ac­cess to the pro­gramme as of June 2022.

The da­ta means thou­sands of mi­grant chil­dren are left with no ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tion. The new school term starts on Sep­tem­ber 5.

Angie Ramnarine, co-ordinator, La Romaine Migrant Support Group.

RISHI RAGOONATH

"We have been say­ing mi­grant chil­dren need to be ed­u­cat­ed for years. We didn’t want to lose a gen­er­a­tion and add to crime and oth­er so­cial prob­lems. We thought that one of the first ways to ad­dress one of the many is­sues that mi­grants were hav­ing was to start with the chil­dren’s ed­u­ca­tion," Ram­nar­ine said.

"My group start­ed with an ed­u­ca­tion thrust. The Catholic Church al­so got in­volved, that's how the St Bene­dict Church in La Ro­maine opened its doors to that whole ex­per­i­ment in ed­u­ca­tion."

Ram­nar­ine, an ex­pe­ri­enced ed­u­ca­tor, has spent 16 years as a teacher of Mod­ern Lan­guages in the sec­ondary school sys­tem.

She ar­gued that the lo­cal ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem is syl­labus-and-ex­am dri­ven and giv­en the back­grounds of the mi­grant chil­dren, how­ev­er, she does not think they should be in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the pub­lic school sys­tem.

While she ad­mits that the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem has its prob­lems, she is call­ing on the au­thor­i­ties to cre­ate spe­cial pro­grammes to as­sist not on­ly Venezue­lan mi­grants but mi­grant chil­dren from all coun­tries.

"Those Venezue­lan chil­dren born here would prob­a­bly adapt to the pub­lic school sys­tem bet­ter than those chil­dren who were born in Venezuela. While we need to ed­u­cate the mi­grants, there was a big gap be­tween aca­d­e­m­ic age and chrono­log­i­cal age.

"I didn’t think that T&T’s pub­lic school sys­tem was the right place for them to start as yet. It would do a dis­ser­vice to the lo­cal teach­ers, as teach­ers are al­ways rush­ing to fin­ish the syl­labus."

Her NGO con­tin­ues to play its part in as­sist­ing mi­grant chil­dren, as she said her group con­tin­ues to pro­vide 'child-friend­ly spaces' to them.

"We were do­ing ‘school’ on the church com­pound since 2019. We are still do­ing it. I just com­plet­ed a one-month camp for school life for them. We use the church hall, and we cater for chil­dren be­tween ages five and 12. The size of this lat­est class is rough­ly 40 stu­dents. We de­pend on vol­un­teer teach­ers."

Dr Anthony Gonzales

Weigh­ing in on the de­bate, for­mer di­rec­tor of the In­sti­tute of In­ter­na­tion­al Re­la­tions, Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) Dr An­tho­ny Gon­za­les told the Sun­day Guardian that if mi­grant chil­dren can be ac­com­mo­dat­ed, then they should be al­lowed in­to the lo­cal pub­lic school sys­tem.

"The In­ter­na­tion­al Refugee Con­ven­tion says once a coun­try gives some­one refugee sta­tus, the coun­try is sup­posed to pro­vide ed­u­ca­tion for the chil­dren. That is large­ly pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion. Coun­tries in the re­gion that do that are the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic and Guyana.

"I don’t know what the prob­lem is in T&T. I don’t know what the num­bers are like and how many more stu­dents T&T’s ed­u­ca­tion can take, but if it is rea­son­able, I think they should take in these mi­grant stu­dents."

The Sun­day Guardian reached out to Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly and Venezue­lan Am­bas­sador Ál­varo En­rique Cordero on the mat­ter, but they did not re­ply up to late yes­ter­day.