As the true im­pact of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic on teach­ers and stu­dents con­tin­ues to emerge, the Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) says in ad­di­tion to re­ports of burnout and ‘Zoom’ fa­tigue in the past two years, they al­so re­ceived res­ig­na­tions from some who were sim­ply un­able to cope with the ur­gent in­tro­duc­tion of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy to reach stu­dents.

TTUTA In­dus­tri­al Re­la­tions Of­fi­cer Ker­ry Broomes yes­ter­day ad­mit­ted, “Yes, we re­ceived sev­er­al com­plaints of teach­ers be­ing burnt out, teach­ers want­i­ng to re­tire.”

He said some teach­ers had re­tired and/or re­signed dur­ing the last two years, “be­cause they felt the emer­gency on­line en­gage­ment was too much for them, es­pe­cial­ly the old­er teach­ers who were, please for­give the term, tech­no­log­i­cal di­nosaurs.”

“It was dif­fi­cult for many of them to learn the new tech­nol­o­gy and ex­e­cute prop­er­ly,” Broomes added.

“What al­so hap­pened is that some teach­ers felt pres­sured, whether it was an in­cor­rect per­cep­tion or in­deed a fact, they felt pres­sured by par­ents, by their ad­min­is­tra­tion, by so­ci­ety in gen­er­al…and they couldn’t deal with it.”

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions dur­ing yes­ter­day’s Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee (JSC) on Lo­cal Au­thor­i­ties, Ser­vice Com­mis­sions and Statu­to­ry Au­thor­i­ties, Broomes said, “Some mem­bers couldn’t han­dle work­ing from home, in a sit­u­a­tion where your home be­came your of­fice and be­cause life hap­pens and per­sons would have had dif­fer­ent chal­lenges, for ex­am­ple, hav­ing chil­dren of school age at home…as a teacher, try­ing to find space for every­one at home to func­tion…and we don’t all have the same size of homes, it be­came very dif­fi­cult and stress­ful.”

Con­firm­ing TTUTA had re­ceived nu­mer­ous com­plaints from mem­bers, Broomes said they tried their best to as­sist where and how they could.

Mean­while, the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (TSC) was called on to speak about the num­ber of teach­ing va­can­cies that ex­ist and the chal­lenges they had faced in fill­ing the posts, which in­clud­ed prin­ci­pals, vice-prin­ci­pals, school su­per­vi­sors, cur­ricu­lum of­fi­cers, deans and heads of de­part­ments.

TSC Chair­man Eliz­a­beth Crouch re­port­ed that via the Vir­tu­al In­ter­view Plat­form, they had suc­cess­ful­ly in­ter­viewed 557 ap­pli­cants for Head of De­part­ment po­si­tions dur­ing the pan­dem­ic and were cur­rent­ly fill­ing 315 posts in sec­ondary schools.

This, she said, was crit­i­cal to deal­ing with stu­dent learn­ing loss and over­see­ing cur­ricu­lum de­liv­ery.

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