EDUCATION Minister Nyan Gadsby-Dolly has said a significant part of the 2022/2023 budget allocation to her ministry will go to schools' infrastructure needs.
The ministry plans to use $165 million of the $7.453 billion allocated to it in this fiscal year for emergencies and other repairs.
Speaking at the PNM’s Diego Martin West 49th constituency conference on Wednesday night, Gadsby-Dolly told the audience deterioration is not uncommon, but the ministry is concerned that more and more schools need emergency repairs.
“Think about your own home, think about how many things go wrong in your home every day – a pipe burst, guttering falling – and multiply that by 800, and think about the fact that schoolchildren running through these buildings, and understand this is always going to be a challenge and something we are going to be spending significant funds on."
She said over 300 of the 800 schools are over 40, some over 60, and "many of them, some of them 100 years old – so you can understand that school infrastructure has to take a significant chunk of the budget.”
If more money is needed, Gadsby-Dolly said, the ministry will source additional funds from the Ministry of Finance.
Her comments came after classes at the San Juan North Secondary School had to be suspended after a piece of concrete from another floor broke off and injured a student below. A photo on social media, purporting to be the child’s head, showed a shaved area with a stitched wound.
Then on Wednesday, the ceiling collapsed in the hallway in front of the staffroom at St George’s College, Barataria. The school has been closed and classes reverted to online. No one was injured.
Confirming reports of the incident at St George’s, Gadsby-Dolly told Newsday on Wednesdaythat it happened after heavy rain damaged the ceiling.
She also shared at Wednesday night’s political meeting that over $900 million from the allocation will be used to assist operations at tertiary-education institutions.
Around $33 million will go to pre-schools, $228 million in grants for schools to cover other operational costs, $400 million for GATE and $380 for social programmes such as transport, training programmes, devices for teachers and students, and help loans.
From the $380 million allocation, $270 million will fund the school feeding programme.
She said, “All of this is aimed at the social aspect of education, helping students so that they are in a place where they can benefit from the education that is given.”
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