The PPP is failing our primary school students

Sep 29, 2013 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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The People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPPC) administration is presiding over a broken primary school system that is failing the most vulnerable section of the population – our children. The chaos in the country’s primary schools continues to contribute to the high rate of delinquency and the low standards of performance. The atrocious results at the essential annual National Grade Six Assessment examinations are evidence of a diseased and disordered system.
‘First-day disarray’ – on Monday 2nd September this year – was only the most recent in the series of annual calamities that plague primary schools countrywide. It was a distressing display of the attitude of the PPPC administration and the Ministry of Education towards the more than 100,000 children who attend public primary schools. Protests are now a commonplace subject on the school curriculum as parents and students find it necessary to object to the conditions which are a disincentive and a deterrent to their studies. Remedial action when taken, however, seems to last only a few months until similar problems recur the following year.
September’s protests against appalling conditions at schools, many of which are located in poor rural and hinterland areas, were the main means of attracting the administration’s attention to the awful conditions under which children study.  Over a hundred Grade Six students of the St Agnes Primary School in Georgetown were locked out of classes during the morning of their first day, owing to insufficient space.
Students at the Beterverwagting Practical Institute Centre in the Demerara-Mahaica Region spent the entire first day outside of classes after teachers protested against the insanitary condition of the school. The Moblissa Primary School was unprepared owing to incomplete construction work. Shortages of furniture, incomplete sanitary blocks and unsanitary conditions prevented schools in the East Berbice-Corentyne Region from functioning efficiently.
The Port Kaituma Primary School in the Barima-Waini Region has been without potable water and students have to depend on the rain for water. The toilets were filthy and the stench was unbearable. The school compound had not been weeded and garbage was dumped outside the back gate. Severe shortages of learning materials at the Mahdia Primary School in the Potaro-Siparuni Region prompted the Parent-Teacher Association to protest. Other complaints included a shortage of textbooks, a shortage of toilet paper and overcrowded classes with as many as 71 students.
The Parent-Teacher Association at the Parika-Salem Primary School in the Essequibo Islands-West Demerara Region locked the gates to protest against unsatisfactory conditions including overcrowding with three or four pupils sitting on one bench in a classroom, flooding in the schoolyard, leaking roofs, unsanitary toilets and bat droppings falling on students during classes.
Parents from La Parfaite Harmonie in the same Region – furious over the state of their primary school which had been built only two years ago – actually blocked the gates of the school there to prevent their children’s attendance. The parents were protesting not only the failure to repair a burnt-out section of the building but, also, the overcrowding, mosquito-infestation, skin infections and uncomfortable heat suffered by their children.
Protests this year were merely a repetition of a pattern that has prevailed over the recent past. The Parent-Teacher Association of the Hope West Primary School at Enmore, Demerara-Mahaica Region, had to bring classes to a halt by protesting against the poor sanitation issues in February 2009. Parents of children attending the Ann’s Grove Primary School, in the same Region, angrily protested against the poor state of the 90-year-old school that same month.
Parents shut down the Bagotville Primary School on the West Bank Demerara and the Golden Grove Primary School on the East Coast Demerara in November that year, to protest the shortage of teachers and the lack of water in the washrooms. Teachers and parents of the St. Ignatius Primary School in the Rupununi Region staged a protest the same month to complain about the absence of potable water and poor sanitation.
The Parent-Teacher Association and scores of residents of Port Kaituma protested the “deplorable” conditions the community primary school and surrounding roads last year. Parents of children at the same school returned to the picket line this month, this time closing down the school on account of its unsanitary conditions, overcrowding, filthy toilets and thick vegetation surrounding the school, which parents described as “unsafe.”
The President of the Republic and the Minister of Education, in a bizarre coincidence and blithely oblivious of the turmoil in the primary schools, merrily participated in a massive rally at the National Park on 13th September to celebrate ‘Education Month.’
The public perception is that the PPPC administration is not serious about creating schools of excellence. Such a policy would need a new attitude to repairing decrepit buildings, to replenishing learning materials, to supplying cleaning materials and to restoring sanitary standards, especially in rural and hinterland primary schools.
These poor conditions, so evident at the annual ‘first-day disarray,’ are contributory factors to the escalation of migration of trained teachers, the rising level of illiteracy, the increasing number of school dropouts and the swelling of the ranks of unemployed youths.

 

 

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