The Barbados National Council of Parent Teacher Associations (BNCPTA) is expected to meet with the teachers’ unions soon to discuss the current challenges in the education system.
President of the BNCPTA, Shone Gibbs, said that those discussions will build on the relationship the Association has been able to form with the unions. He made the comments while speaking to the media following a service at the Mount of Praise Wesleyan Holiness Church, where the new Executive Committee was installed.
“We believe anything that impacts on the teachers, impacts on students; and the welfare of teachers within the school, also speaks to the welfare of students within the school. So we all have the same agenda, we have the same concerns and as natural allies we should all work together to make sure that the school environment is wholesome, productive and conducive for teaching and learning,” he said.
Gibbs made the point as he noted that the BNCPTA also sees the need for all the stakeholders, including the Ministry of Education to engage in talks on the issues that having been coming to the fore in recent times.
“We need to sit down and the sooner we can sit down, the better it will be for all parties involved. There has been too much cross talk between the different parties and we have not been able to come together yet and sit down and discuss what are the burning issues, which would have escalated from the recent spate of incidences of violence within schools,” he said.
With that in mind, Gibbs remains adamant that violence in schools cannot be tolerated. He said whether such violence is between students, teacher on student, or student on teacher, every effort must be made to remove it from the school system.
“We are concerned that the home-school relationship has not been as strong as it should be which has led to a lot of the breaches, and we want to encourage parents especially to get involved within the system, to get involved within your school, be a face within the school, be known within the school… It makes way for when there are issues that a parent can be contacted and matters resolved at the domestic level,” the BNCPTA president said.
He added, “We believe schools are like families, we will have problems but we must be able to solve them within the context of the home, within the school community, as swiftly as possible to ensure that we don’t have the fallout that we are currently seeing from some minor issues that I believe could be settled at the level of the domestic PTA.”
With that in mind though, Gibbs told the media that the BNCPTA is concerned that too often the domestic PTAs are not briefed on issues arising in the schools. This, he charged, denies the PTA a fair chance to assist parents in how to raise their concerns. He lamented that by the time the PTA is informed about an issue, it has usually deteriorated into “something negative”. (JRT)
