Shane Su­perville

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

With schools set to re­open next week, Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) pres­i­dent Crys­tal Ashe is de­mand­ing an­swers from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion over the readi­ness of school fa­cil­i­ties, rais­ing con­cerns about what he de­scribed as a “late start” to main­te­nance works on some build­ings.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Ashe claimed that re­pairs to some school fa­cil­i­ties be­gan in Au­gust in­stead of Ju­ly, which he said was not ad­e­quate time for much-need­ed works to be com­plet­ed be­fore the be­gin­ning of the new term.

Ashe said that while he was un­able to con­firm specif­i­cal­ly which schools were in the most dire need of up­grades or which may not be ready for re-open­ing next week, is­sues such as the avail­abil­i­ty of ad­e­quate fur­ni­ture and the gen­er­al con­di­tion of school equip­ment re­mained a ma­jor con­cern at many build­ings.

“You have stu­dents not hav­ing suf­fi­cient fur­ni­ture to sit on; we have teach­ers who don’t have suf­fi­cient fur­ni­ture to sit on.

“I vis­it­ed a school in San­gre Grande, and when I looked at some of the fur­ni­ture there, it was in a de­plorable state. They were ter­mite-in­fest­ed; you could have put your fin­ger and it would have passed straight through the bench, so chil­dren are leav­ing the safe­ty of their par­ents’ homes to come to a school which is sup­posed to be a safe en­vi­ron­ment, and what are you sit­ting on? You’re sit­ting on some­thing that can in­jure you.”

Ashe al­so raised con­cerns about se­cu­ri­ty at school com­pounds, re­fer­ring to re­ports that a stranger walked on­to the com­pound of the San­ta Rosa Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School in June 2025. He said this was linked to com­plaints from staff over the ab­sence of a perime­ter fence around the school com­pound.

He said the Min­istry need­ed to take a more proac­tive ap­proach to re­pair­ing crit­i­cal pieces of in­fra­struc­ture, as these could pose a se­ri­ous dan­ger to stu­dents.

“A lot of schools have is­sues in terms of the perime­ter fences; we want to make sure our stu­dents are safe at all times.”

He urged Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry of­fi­cials to iden­ti­fy the schools in most ur­gent need of re­pairs and deal with them im­me­di­ate­ly, while al­so urg­ing Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Michael Dowlath to ad­dress the con­cerns.

“Dr Michael Dowlath, speak out on these is­sues be­cause we’re not hear­ing from him at all. It would seem that he’s miss­ing in ac­tion.”

Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed the Bel­mont Sec­ondary School yes­ter­day, where some ac­tiv­i­ty was no­ticed.

The com­pound it­self ap­peared to be in gen­er­al­ly good con­di­tion; how­ev­er, graf­fi­ti and mark­ings with gang links were ob­served be­neath a stair­case on the east­ern edge of the com­pound.

As con­cerns over school readi­ness con­tin­ue, for­mer Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion and vice-chair­man of the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly al­so posed sev­er­al ques­tions to Dr Dowlath dur­ing an Op­po­si­tion me­dia brief­ing yes­ter­day.

She claimed that few­er than 5,000 of the 20,000 gov­ern­ment-is­sued book grants were processed.

“The ques­tion we are ask­ing the Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion is how many book grants will be paid from to­day?

Re­fer­ring to ter­mi­na­tions from sev­er­al state agen­cies, in­clud­ing the Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP) and the Forestry Di­vi­sion of the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, Land and Fish­eries last year, Gads­by-Dol­ly al­so ac­cused the Gov­ern­ment of plac­ing par­ents at a greater dis­ad­van­tage due to the loss of liveli­hoods for some house­holds.

“In this year, 20,000 (book grants) are still of­fered, even though more than 50,000 ad­di­tion­al per­sons have been put on the bread­line due to the poli­cies of the UNC.”

When con­tact­ed for a re­sponse to the con­cerns raised via tele­phone yes­ter­day, Dowlath sug­gest­ed this re­porter send him the ques­tions via Whats App.

How­ev­er, no re­sponse was re­ceived up to press time.