CARISA LEE

Re­porter

The pres­i­dent of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teacher's As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA), Mar­tin Lum Kin, is urg­ing the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry to put more mea­sures in place to mon­i­tor cor­doned off ar­eas or aban­doned and con­demned sec­tions in the na­tion’s schools.

This, af­ter a fire that broke out on Block-C of the San Juan North Sec­ondary School on Wednes­day.

“There should be ways of mon­i­tor­ing parts of the school that do not have se­cu­ri­ty per­son­nel,” he told Guardian Me­dia.  “So, CCTV cam­eras are one so­lu­tion that can be em­ployed.  They al­so can have ad­di­tion se­cu­ri­ty per­son­nel to do reg­u­lar se­cu­ri­ty checks and pa­trols.”

The TTUTA pres­i­dent ex­pressed con­cern that things could have been dif­fer­ent had the fire tak­en place dur­ing reg­u­lar school hours. 

He says the Fire Ser­vice is still in­ves­ti­gat­ing pos­si­ble caus­es of the fire.

Lum Kin al­so is con­cerned at the im­pli­ca­tions of the fire hav­ing been set by a stu­dent at the fa­cil­i­ty, whether ac­ci­den­tal­ly or de­lib­er­ate­ly.  He be­lieves if the fire was de­lib­er­ate­ly set by a per­son or per­sons from the school, those re­spon­si­ble should be se­vere­ly rep­ri­mand­ed.