BASSETERRE, St. Kitts - THE new school year is fast approaching and it is around this time in particular (late August) that parents are usually called to the various schools to collect their child/children's Student Education Learning Fund (SELF) textbooks, courtesy of the SELF Textbook Distribution Programme.
The programme, since its inception, has been providing, at no cost, the necessary textbooks needed for high school children whose parents are not in a financial position to purchase them, but that freebie will soon be gone as parents are now being asked to provide a fee for their child/children's textbooks.
Parents are of the view that the fee is to be paid for the distribution of the books, but according to SELF Co-ordinator, Donna Bassue, the fee that will be paid by the parents is a Book Maintenance Fee that would be used towards the maintenance and repairs of the books upon their return at the end of the school year.
"The fee is not to pay for the textbooks, so we are not charging them to get the textbooks, the fee is just to maintain the textbooks and repair them when needed, because every year we would have to order kits to repair them."
She said that when the books are returned, they are usually not in good condition and often sit unrepaired.
"When I went to visit the schools, I did an evaluation on the books and what I noticed was that a lot of the books were in need of repair. They were just sitting on the shelves because the covers were off, leaves were torn out and so forth."
Bassue said that following her report to her superiors, it was decided that that instead of having the books just sitting on the shelves, they should be repaired, but the cost of the repair kit would be great.
"After I went to the library store and looked at the kits, I realised it would cost us a lot because each school would need one and it only lasts for one year because there are a lot of books in each school that are in need of repair.
"So we made the decision to order the kits but each student, because they would have had the books for an entire school year, they would have to pay a little fee to help maintain the books. After having them for one year, they would need some sort of repairs so we decided to give them whatever books they would need but they would pay a maintenance fee to keep the books in good condition," she explained.
The fee, she said, is $25 per child, but for those parents who have more than two children in the school, the fee is fixed at $50 total.
Bassue went on to state, "We are presently having workshops with the teachers involved in the SELF project on how to thoroughly repair the books. We are going to have facilitators and we are going to go through the entire process. Those teachers would then be responsible for maintaining the textbooks, so at the end of the year when the books come in, they would do the repairing of the books, and that is where the $25 comes in."
The SELF Coordinator explained that the students who have always been on the Government Social Safety-Net Programme (Social Welfare) would be exempted from having to pay the maintenance fee.
She said that the list of names would be distributed to the various schools so that those students would not have to pay the fee.
The SELF Textbook Distribution Programme, a Government sponsored initiative, provides some of the more widely used texts books to students whose parents cannot afford them, at little to no cost.
