Minister of Education Ronald Jones (left) and Acting Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Education Guilford Alleyne during yesterday’s meeting with the Barbados Secondary Teachers Union (BSTU) at the Ministry of Education’s headquarters. The parties met with the hope of resolving the outstanding issues at the Alexandra School.
BSTU hails meeting as ‘productive’
7/29/2010
Within the next four weeks the outstanding issues at the Alexandra School are expected to be resolved and there will be an orderly start to the school year in September.
This was the outcome after yesterday’s four-hour meeting with the executive of the Barbados Secondary Teachers Union (BSTU), Ministry of Education officials and 20 teachers of the Alexandra School. Principal of the Alexandra School Jeff Broomes was not in attendance.
Speaking to the Barbados Advocate yesterday, President of the BSTU, Mary Redman said that the meeting was very “cordial and productive”.
“Coming out of that meeting the Ministry agreed that the implementation of the letter of May 17 which dealt with the docking of pay of the teachers of the Alexandra School teachers who went on strike, would be put on hold pending the outcome of completed negotiations. This means for us in the BSTU that we can now continue with negotiations because that letter had actually brought us to an impasse,” said Redman.
She stated that both sides agreed that there is a need to hastily resolve outstanding issues and they have committed to “a speedy resolution of all the outstanding issues in the next two to four weeks.”
Redman added that the Ministry has agreed that the matters on which they had already reached resolution, but had not been implemented, would be addressed forthwith.
The BSTU president said that the union is “very pleased with the Ministry’s decision to do a full institutional inspection. We had suggested this previously and the Ministry will now follow through with it and the BSTU will nominate a member of the inspection team.”
She explained that an institutional inspection entails a team coming into a school to do an appraisal of the institution from the leadership style, management of the school, pedagogy of the school to a financial audit.
While stating that the Minister of Education Ronald Jones said this inspection should take place soon, she added that Minister Jones has committed himself to at least one follow up meeting next week,
Redman said that at next week’s meeting, “We are going to finally deal with the outstanding letter of 11th January that we had been hoping to have addressed in the last few months. That letter deals with industrial issues and assurances that we need at the school and given all of the above the BSTU has agreed to an orderly start of the new school year.”
“We are generally quite satisfied with the level of seriousness and commitment that the Minister brought to the meeting. He came in there to address the issues and that he did. We look forward to that same attitude and approach next week,” she said. (AR)
