Rhon­dor

Dowlat-Ros­tant

Na­tion­al Pri­ma­ry Schools’ Prin­ci­pals As­so­ci­a­tion is rec­om­mend­ing that the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion soft­ens its tone, con­sult as far as is pos­si­ble with all ma­jor stake­hold­ers in ed­u­ca­tion.

It al­so called on the min­istry to stop threat­en­ing prin­ci­pals and teach­ers.

Ac­cord­ing to the NAPSPA’s pres­i­dent, Lance Mot­t­ley, in a re­lease, ex­plained that the as­so­ci­a­tion has no dif­fi­cul­ty in as­sist­ing the ed­u­ca­tion min­istry in con­tin­u­ing to pro­vide for the needs of the na­tion’s stu­dents, “once it is with­in rea­son.”

Mot­t­ley said frankly that what the as­so­ci­a­tion has is “great dif­fi­cul­ty, how­ev­er, with the harsh and con­de­scend­ing tones that the min­istry seems to pre­fer to use to en­gage us.”

“Every ac­tion has a re­ac­tion, and such tones by the MOE and its agents do not sit well with our teach­ing pro­fes­sion­als,” Mot­t­ley said.

“Fur­ther, the in­struc­tions from the min­istry gen­er­al­ly tend to lack con­text of pur­pose: prin­ci­pals and teach­ers would re­act more pos­i­tive­ly if the pur­pose of these ‘re­quests’ are stat­ed up­front. It ap­pears that it is on­ly when there is re­sis­tance, that the MOE sees it fit to pro­vide con­text, but of course, not with­out threats. We con­demn this at­ti­tude strong­ly and re­ject it out­right,” he added.

Mot­t­ley went on to state that there might be the think­ing among some high rank­ing of­fi­cials that prin­ci­pals and teach­ers are at the low­er end of the hi­er­ar­chy of the MOE “and as such, we do not need to be con­sult­ed. Frankly, that kind of think­ing is noth­ing short of ar­ro­gant and on­ly serves to fur­ther the di­vide of ‘them’ and ‘us’.

“In this era of en­gage­ment, there is a need for gen­uine con­sul­ta­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion, and open­ness of pur­pose.”

“Per­haps, if this kind of at­ti­tude was adopt­ed by the MOE since the clo­sure of schools due to the pan­dem­ic, then there may not have been a need for such a di­rec­tive by TTUTA. It should be not­ed that al­though many teach­ers would have at­tempt­ed to reach out to stu­dents, they were faced with chal­lenges as many stu­dents do not have ac­cess to the in­ter­net nor the where­with­al to ac­cess teach­ing-learn­ing ma­te­ri­als on­line,” Mot­t­ley said.

The NAPSPA stat­ed that like every­one in Trinidad and To­ba­go, prin­ci­pals and teach­ers are very well aware that these are not nor­mal times fac­ing the coun­try, “and ac­cept that the re­sponse from every­one to this pan­dem­ic, there­fore re­quires ad­just­ments to the way we do busi­ness; it is def­i­nite­ly not busi­ness as usu­al.

In fact, many of our prin­ci­pals and teach­ers would have put things in place to en­gage stu­dents re­mote­ly as much as was pos­si­ble, even be­fore the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion got in­volved.”

It added that this no­ble act speaks to the lev­el of com­mit­ment and ded­i­ca­tion to ed­u­ca­tion by the teach­ing Fra­ter­ni­ty, “but most of all, a recog­ni­tion and un­der­stand­ing that these are un­usu­al cir­cum­stances that re­quire all hands on deck.”