Ten schools on one street

Aug 24, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – Guyana never ceases to amaze me. There are moments when a government announces an achievement and it is done in such a manner that one is expected to feel grateful for the evidence of progress.

Some of these announcements are about routine things. Yet, the announcement is made with the solemnity usually reserved for a national breakthrough. A road is being improved. A drain is being constructed. A problem has been identified and money is being spent upon it. The machinery is there. The concrete is being poured. And because concrete is visible, progress is assumed.

Recently, someone proudly announced that there are ten schools on Woolford Avenue in Georgetown. Ten schools on one street. There are, apparently, more than 6,000 children attending these schools.

The announcement was followed by another piece of information, offered as evidence of governmental concern and achievement: two concrete drains are being constructed along the avenue, at considerable cost, so that children will no longer have to walk to school through water. This sounds like progress, PPPC style.

The water is there because the drainage is inadequate. The children are there because ten schools have been concentrated along one narrow avenue. The traffic is there because thousands of children must somehow arrive at these schools each morning and leave them each afternoon. And the solution, apparently, is to spend millions of dollars digging deeper drains.

There is something peculiarly Guyanese about this kind of reasoning. We create the problem and then congratulate ourselves for addressing one of its consequences.

Ten schools on one street is a traffic-management nightmare waiting to happen twice a day.

Once upon a time, many children walked to school. The school was part of the neighbourhood and the neighbourhood was part of the school. But things have changed. Parents now drive their children. Some arrive in cars; others in taxis, minibuses and other vehicles. Parents stop where they can. Children cross the road where they can. Everyone competes for a few yards of asphalt.

Now multiply this by more than 6,000 students.

Imagine the morning. A narrow street. Thousands of children. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of vehicles converging upon the same small stretch of road within a relatively short period. One parent is dropping off a child. Another is reversing. A taxi has stopped in the middle of the road. A minibus is loading passengers.

The traffic authority can put officers there. They can wave their arms. But there is a limit to what traffic management can achieve when urban planning has already created the congestion.

The obvious question is not why children are walking through water. The obvious question is why ten schools, serving more than 6,000 students, have been allowed to remain concentrated on one narrow street in the first place?

If some of these schools are not secondary schools, why could they not have been relocated to communities in the surrounding areas from which their students are supposed to come from?

This would have been more than a drainage project. It would have been planning.

The strange thing is that the drainage project may now make the original planning failure more permanent. The government will have spent millions of dollars constructing the drains, and everyone will congratulate everyone else when the water disappears. The ten schools will remain. The 6,000 students will remain. The cars will remain. The congestion will remain.

And then, some years from now, another project may be announced to widen the road.

But there is an obvious opportunity now. If these drains are being constructed, why not cover properly and let them double up as both a pavement and drain, and use the additional space to widen the roadway? Why construct an expensive concrete trench beside a road when the same investment could help solve both the drainage and traffic problems?

It is the difference between reacting to a problem and thinking about solving a problem.

Ten schools in one street may look impressive when presented as a statistic. It sounds like educational abundance. But when those ten schools disgorge more than 6,000 students into a narrow roadway twice every day, the statistic changes character. It becomes a warning.

The children deserve better. The parents deserve better. The traffic authorities deserve better.

And the city deserves planners who will look beyond the next drain.

For the real achievement would not be to ensure that 6,000 children can reach ten schools without walking through water. The achievement would be to ask, why 6,000 children have to converge upon the same narrow street at all? No wonder Georgetown is congested with traffic.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• Neighbourhood, Peeping Tom, schools

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