Akash Sama­roo

Se­nior Re­porter/Pro­duc­er

akash.sama­roo@cnc3.co.tt

In its first of­fi­cial meet­ing with Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Michael Dowlath, the T&T Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) raised sev­er­al is­sues, chief among them, the de­lays in the up­grad­ing and pro­mo­tion of teach­ers.

Ac­cord­ing to TTUTA pres­i­dent Mar­tin Lum Kin, the meet­ing held on Wednes­day, al­so dealt with hu­man re­source is­sues in­clud­ing teacher short­ages, act­ing ap­point­ments and staffing in­ef­fi­cien­cies. Lum Kin said the is­sue of greater sup­port ser­vices for stu­dents and pro­fes­sion­al de­vel­op­ment for teach­ers was al­so dis­cussed. The meet­ing al­so dealt with the set­tling of ar­rears and out­stand­ing fi­nan­cial oblig­a­tions to ed­u­ca­tors and im­prov­ing the com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels be­tween the min­istry and ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions.

Lum Kin said the is­sue of school vi­o­lence was al­so briefly dis­cussed and Min­is­ter Dowlath gave the com­mit­ment that the root cause of vi­o­lent be­hav­iour will al­so be ad­dressed in tan­dem with the gov­ern­ment’s ap­proach to ex­pel and pros­e­cute stu­dents en­gag­ing in that con­duct.

The TTUTA pres­i­dent said Min­is­ter Dowlath gave as­sur­ances that these con­cerns would be ad­dressed through the ap­pro­pri­ate pro­to­cols and mech­a­nisms.

Lum Kin al­so told Guardian Me­dia, “There’s com­mit­ment to have termly meet­ings with the Ho­n­ourable Min­is­ter, a month­ly meet­ing with the min­istry’s per­ma­nent sec­re­tary and third sched­ule meet­ings.”

TTUTA said it is al­so wel­com­ing the op­por­tu­ni­ty for con­tin­ued col­lab­o­ra­tion and mean­ing­ful di­a­logue with the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry.

The day af­ter Dowlath was sworn in as Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter in May, TTUTA pre­sent­ed its wish list to Guardian Me­dia, TTUTA first vice pres­i­dent Adesh Dwari­ka said at the top of their list was en­sur­ing teach­ers get the pro­mo­tions they worked hard to at­tain.

Dwari­ka ex­plained, “There is the UTT (Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go)/USC (Uni­ver­si­ty of the South­ern Caribbean) sit­u­a­tion of 2010, where those stu­dents were of­fered a schol­ar­ship by the uni­ver­si­ty to at­tend UTT up­on the clos­ing of the teach­ers’ col­leges and they were ad­vised to do var­i­ous spe­cial­i­sa­tions, pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary.

“Those who did the pri­ma­ry were up­grad­ed to T1 Pri­ma­ry, but those who did the sec­ondary spe­cial­i­sa­tion ba­si­cal­ly have been in no man’s land for the last 15 years.”

Dwari­ka said those teach­ers earned de­grees but are still con­sid­ered as­sis­tant teach­ers.