The South East Port-of-Spain Sec­ondary School is set to re­sume class­es next week as im­prove­ment works are sched­uled to be com­plet­ed by the week­end.

This ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion which in­di­cat­ed a team of stake­hold­ers vis­it­ed the school on Fri­day to ob­serve the works.

“A walk­through of the plant to as­sess the progress of works done and the school’s readi­ness for re­open­ing was car­ried out by a team of se­nior of­fi­cials from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion on Fri­day 10th Jan­u­ary 2020. Mem­bers of the Par­ents Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (PTA) were al­so part of the walk­through and ex­pressed their sat­is­fac­tion with the scale of works com­plet­ed thus far,” the re­lease stat­ed.

A con­trac­tor is cur­rent­ly in­stalling con­crete lou­vre blocks in class­rooms, fol­lowed by the de­mo­li­tion of the in­ter­nal face of the build­ing and the in­stal­la­tion of wrought iron pan­els to al­low for more ven­ti­la­tion and cir­cu­la­tion of air.

The lou­vre in­stal­la­tion fol­lows an in­ci­dent on No­vem­ber 27 when a stray bul­let fired from a gun by men in­volved in gang war­fare in the area en­tered a class­room. The in­ci­dent led to teach­ers walk­ing off the com­pound and lat­er de­mand­ed in­creased se­cu­ri­ty for them­selves and the stu­dents dur­ing school hours; to which the Min­istry has oblig­ed.

Form Five stu­dents of the school be­gan class­es at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTT) John Don­ald­son Cam­pus, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain on Jan­u­ary 7.

No­vem­ber’s shoot­ing left stu­dents, teach­ers and par­ents par­a­lyzed by fear. Class­es were dis­con­tin­ued for a pe­ri­od and re­sumed af­ter the ed­u­ca­tion min­istry beefed up se­cu­ri­ty around the com­pound as an in­ter­im mea­sure to boost se­cu­ri­ty. Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion con­demned the vi­o­lence and lament­ed it was not the first re­port they had re­ceived about how dan­ger­ous the sur­round­ing area of the school was.