Ap­prox­i­mate­ly one week be­fore the new school term, the To­ba­go arm of the Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) is rais­ing con­cerns about school readi­ness, ac­cus­ing the Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion of fail­ing to pro­vide clear up­dates on its 2025 re­pair pro­gramme.

TTUTA To­ba­go of­fi­cer Bradon Roberts said the union sub­mit­ted a list of con­cerns since April but has re­ceived no feed­back. He warned that with­out trans­paren­cy, teach­ers, par­ents and stu­dents could face an­oth­er Sep­tem­ber of un­re­solved prob­lems.

“We have not got­ten any­thing from the Di­vi­sion… what we want this time around is trans­paren­cy,” Roberts told Guardian Me­dia. “When we come out, our schools in­di­cate to all our schools the work that you were not able to do, when would those works be done, the schools who had work that would not be com­plet­ed in time, how they ex­pect to com­plete it. We do not get hon­esty from our politi­cians na­tion­al­ly.”

Roberts said TTUTA iden­ti­fied plumb­ing, elec­tri­cal, roof­ing and mould is­sues in more than 20 schools. He al­so raised con­cern about fund­ing, sug­gest­ing the ac­tu­al need was clos­er to $40 mil­lion.

“Bud­get­ing 20 mil­lion, to me, doesn’t show that we un­der­stand the grav­i­ty of the work,” he said. “We can un­der­stand that there are chal­lenges. Even if we look for the cor­po­rate sec­tor to as­sist, they can on­ly help you when you are hon­est.”

He said un­safe con­di­tions put both teach­ers and stu­dents at risk.

“It’s not that we look for­ward to shut­ting down schools… an un­safe space for our teach­ers is al­so an un­safe space for the stu­dents. So we are look­ing for the ben­e­fit of every­body.”

Roberts ac­cused politi­cians of fo­cus­ing on ap­pear­ances in­stead of re­sults.

“We do stuff, we do me­dia stuff, we present our­selves as do­ing a lot of things, but not re­al­ly achiev­ing any­thing. It’s frus­trat­ing though,” he said.

Sec­re­tary of Ed­u­ca­tion Zor­isha Hack­ett told Guardian Me­dia the pro­gramme is ad­vanc­ing on sched­ule un­der the man­age­ment of E-ID­COT.

She said $20 mil­lion was al­lo­cat­ed to cov­er 45 pack­ages across 30 schools. Of these, 24 pack­ages start­ed ear­ly—those re­quir­ing longer ex­e­cu­tion—while the re­main­ing 21 be­gan soon af­ter.

“All works are ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed be­fore the re­open­ing of schools on Sep­tem­ber 8,” Hack­ett said.

She added that the Di­vi­sion had to pri­ori­tise works with­in the bud­get, fo­cus­ing on ur­gent re­pairs that di­rect­ly af­fect health, safe­ty and ed­u­ca­tion de­liv­ery.

“These in­clude struc­tur­al re­in­force­ments, roof re­pairs, elec­tri­cal up­grades, plumb­ing im­prove­ments and oth­er crit­i­cal in­ter­ven­tions,” she said.

While Roberts re­mains scep­ti­cal, he said the as­so­ci­a­tion will in­spect schools in the days lead­ing up to re­open­ing to de­ter­mine whether the Di­vi­sion’s promis­es hold.