BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – THE Basseterre High School situation, which played out for a couple of years, caused a great deal of trauma to students, teachers and even parents and the Ministry of Education has been taking a proactive approach to ensure that issues arising at other schools are nipped in the bud as early as possible.
To this end, Minister of Education the Hon. Shawn K. Richards told SKNVibes that his Ministry has been making regular checks at the learning institutions and identified problems have been and continue to be rectified.
To date, he stated, repairs were carried out at more than seven schools.
“The Ministry of Education is having ongoing visits. There is ongoing dialogue with the different principals, management teams at the different schools to ascertain what issues, if any, the Ministry would have to address at the schools. We have been doing refurbishments, we have been doing repairs at a number of schools in the Federation. This is an ongoing process.
“For example, during the course of this year and late last year, we would have done some repairs to the Fifth Form block at the Sandy Point High School. We had an issue there where the roof was infested with bats. That problem has now been rectified. We have done work at Cayon High School on an entire block there. We are looking at a next block there, which we intend to hopefully do some work on this year.”
He said a number of primary schools have also seen needed repairs.
“We have done work at the Newton Ground Primary School, the Dieppe Bay Primary School and we are currently in the process of undertaking work at the Washington Archibald High School where the fence there has been down for quite a while...and so that is a potential security risk. So that is being addressed. We have done work at Sandy Point Primary School where we had some issues with the bathroom facilities. As a matter of fact, there is now a BNTF project which we are looking at to address the Sandy Point Primary School bathroom in a more comprehensive and more complete manner.”
The Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College, Minister Richards indicated, has also been the subject of repairs.
“So we continue to do work at just about all of the educational institutions; primary schools, high schools and our day care centres. I should also add that even at CFBC, recently we had to do work on the roof there. That was done early this year because the roof there had been leaking, and because of that the science labs in particular were affected. Students were not in the best position to do their different experiments. That problem has now been rectified. There is an additional block up at CFBC that has been earmarked for repairs very shortly.”
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