Education Ministry willing to help parents in need

EDUCATION Minister Santia Bradshaw says there are some challenges with rolling out the e-Learning platform for students and teachers, but gave the assurance that efforts are being made to ensure that no child is left behind.

Speaking during a discussion hosted by the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation yesterday, she revealed that COVID- 19 has brought a number of challenges facing families to the fore.

“What we want is engagement with our students because I think people would appreciate that oftentimes when we are trying to understand the socio-economic factors in a household, oftentimes that information is not forthcoming. For instance, parents don’t often say they don’t have electricity. They are not telling the teacher, they are not telling the principal. They are not saying that there is one device in a household and six children have to be able to have access to that device.

“These are all issues and I think COVID is raising in terms of the inequalities, in terms of challenges that households are having and therefore as a Ministry while we always knew inequalities existed, we are relying primarily on our teachers and certainly principals and parents generally to be able to feed that information through the Ministry of Education, so that we can respond. Because these are not questions that ordinarily we may ask and it is not information that oftentimes parents are comfortable providing to persons in authority, so we are asking people to share that information as best that they can because we genuinely want to help, we don’t want children to be left behind.

“I can say to you that we have had discussions with the BL&P and they are working with us where we identify students who may not have access to electricity, and who may need connections as well, to be able to facilitate that because I think the general feeling across all sectors is that we don’t want any children to be left behind. So far we have had about 4000 students that we have identified in the system who are perhaps what we we consider more vulnerable in terms of not having access to these devices; we anticipate that there will probably be more than that in the coming weeks,” she said.

Minister Bradshaw revealed that teachers have been told not to spend time teaching new concepts in the third term, so that students who were unable to join the class do not feel disadvantaged.
She added that the majority of teachers have been trained but explained that they, too, are faced with their own challenges. “It is a challenging environment because they were dealing with issues where they themselves have to look after their own kids and their elderly family within the household so we are trying to get as much information in terms of what is happening within the households – both within the teachers and students – so that we could adjust the timetable or adjust the one-to-one learning with our students and be able to take that into account.”

It was noted that a hotline has been set up within the Ministry of Education for those parents who do not have devices for their children or are facing challenges with WiFi connectivity or electricity.
“We’ve said to principals and in turn they have said to teachers, we know that everyone does not have a device, we know that they are familiarising themselves with the devices and how to engage in terms of lessons plans in this new environment, so we are not going too hard on you at this point.”

As it relates to potentially reopening schools, Bradshaw the Ministry is being guided by health officials. (JH)