WORK WITH UNIONS

Implementing a comprehensive maintenance programme at all Government primary and secondary schools is the solution to avoiding any potential health and environmental issues that would creep up in the schools.

Speaking in reaction to the protest action that had recently taken place by parents at the St. Philip-based St. Mark’s Primary School, President of the Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT), Pedro Shepherd, said that short-term solutions, such as having persons go into these schools during the summer vacation and fix up some of the issues that teachers, students and parents are complaining about, is not the answer.

Instead, maintenance is an activity that must be carried out on a continuous basis and he called officials at the Ministry of Education to work with the teacher’s unions in this regard.

“Rather than spending the small sums during the summer and peace meal programmes – we need to look at a comprehensive programme to repair a lot of the older schools and where we have general workers in schools – I keep saying that general workers employed in our schools need to be trained and equipped to deal with the issues of the schools. But because a lot of the schools just want routine maintenance – if we get routine maintenance in schools then we wouldn’t have the massive repairs that we tend to find coming up in the summer programme. So as I keep saying –the Ministry needs to collaborate with the unions. If the Ministry collaborates with the unions, we can feed information into the Ministry as to what some of the challenges are, as they crop up, so that they will not develop into these major issues.”

This is because the need for repairs, especially in the older schools, is something that occurs frequently.

“Well as I said there are still a lot of issues relating to health and safety in schools, environmental conditions in schools. I think that the Ministry tries, but I keep saying that the short-term fixes are not helping. So where you have schools with mould for example, and you go in and sanitise and then you put back the charts on the walls or you refuse to cover the walls with something that will not allow the moisture to seep through, and so on, particularly this is in the older schools – those with the coral and so on, particularly will be having this issue of mould. This week only in St. Mark’s, parents complained about the conditions of some of the schools and I keep saying that as a union – from a union perspective – that the Ministry needs to have a proper maintenance programme and the summer programme needs to be looked at differently.”

At the time, Shepherd was speaking to the media on the sidelines of a health and wellness fair to culminate Teacher’s Week recently at BUT headquarters.