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President of the Barbados Secondary Teachers’ Union (BSTU), Mary-Anne Redman, conversing with President of the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW), Akanni McDowall and BSTU Consultant, Patrick Frost at the NUPW’s Headquarters before the start of BSTU’s meeting, yesterday.

BSTU gets meeting

The Barbados Secondary Teachers’ Union (BSTU) will be meeting with officials from the Ministry of Education regarding serious problems occurring at the St. George Secondary School.

The meeting, scheduled for today at 2:30 p.m. at the school, will seek to reveal to the Ministry, health and safety issues at that institution, as well as
serious ongoing concerns as it relates to student-on-student violence and student-on-teacher attacks, both of a physical and verbal nature.

“Our march has already reaped benefits. Because in short order we have gotten a meeting to deal with the problems at the St. George Secondary School,” President
of the BSTU, Mary-Anne Redman told members, referring to last month’s ‘March of Respect’, which saw teachers taking to the streets signalling their dissatisfaction with the Ministry’s handling of their various concerns.

Yesterday, addressing a special meeting called at the National Union of Public Workers (NUPW), Redman said that while grateful for the opportunity, she
will be voicing her dismay about the scheduling of meetings at the end of the school day.

“The Ministry now has this thing of scheduling meetings at 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., where you then have to sit down after your full day of work and engage in meetings that only touch two or three items of a long agenda because they have not held meetings for two years before that one, for example,” she stated.

“So, we have a problem with the timing of meetings from the Ministry of Education. To my mind, it is not demonstrating a seriousness or the degree of seriousness necessary to deal the myriad of problems that we have at our schools,” she stressed.

During BSTU’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) held on April 11, the President shared with members that on a recent visit to St. George Secondary School, they were able to see a well overflowing and on investigation they were informed that it was a sewage well. She also said that teachers there are exposed to “some of the most horrendous comments that children can make to adults”.

Redman therefore stressed that a meeting with education officials was needed to address the serious concerns there, if the school was to have the type of start that the Ministry of Education might want at the beginning of next term, which got underway today. (TL)

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