WHO?WILL?BRING?NORMALCY back to The Alexandra School?
Can we count on the Ministry of Education to do it? Or on the silent Minister of Education? Or will it take the Prime Minister to intervene?
After some dilly-dallying, the Ministry of Education has finally spoken to the December threats of the Barbados Secondary Teachers’ Union (BSTU) and its president Mary Redman. The ministry’s word has come by order.
The Alexandra staff have been told to get back into the classrooms, for “to go to school and not conduct themselves relative to their remit is dangerous and can have severe legal implications for those teachers if any harm comes to any student who should have been in any teacher’s care”.
Added the strongly worded official statement of Tuesday: “The interest of the students remains the ministry’s singular priority.”
And that is why, says the Ministry of Education, it asked that the industrial action by the BSTU cease, while The Alexandra’s latest rift “is carefully and fully investigated”.
The ministry meets with Alexandra principal Jeff Broomes today. When it does with the BSTU, we know not.
The question is: what if the teachers’ union ignores the ministry’s request?
The answer lies in what will be done with the students of Alexandra, who have not had a normal class since the new term began nigh 12 days ago.
For all the meetings that the Ministry of Education will call, the most urgent of matters to be tackled by it has to be the continued and no longer uninterrupted education of Alexandra’s students. It cannot be fair to those preparing for CXC exams.
So what will the Ministry of Education do? If it truly holds The Alexandra students’ interest as the singular priority in this embattlement, it will make arrangement for immediate, alternative study elsewhere for this year’s CXC sitters.
Surely, Minister of Education Ronald Jones can identify with this initiative!
It is all well and good to echo in the public domain the rights and priorities of our charges; it is much more defining to be proactive in this pressing affair.
Regrettably, as interest groups harden their positions, it seems incumbent on Prime Minister Freundel Stuart to intervene and use his more sober mind to bring to conclusion this sad state of confrontation, intellectual warfare and rashness, by whose hands our nation’s children stand to benefit nothing but strained memories.