More education rackets

FORMER Education Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar breathed fire and brimstone in Parliament yesterday as she accused her successor Hazel Manning of allowing several “education rackets” to occur under her (Manning’s) watch.  Persad-Bissessar shot down Manning’s contribution to the 2003/2004 Budget, saying “the ideas are all the same” and the PNM could not “pelt money” at education and hope to fix its deficiencies. “There is not one single new approach,” she declared.

The Siparia MP questioned the circumstances under which two textbook rental contracts were awarded and charged the PNM with “opening the door for corruption” in education, after the former Government stopped a $300 million textbook racket dead in its tracks. She further alleged that corruption had now infected the School Feeding Programme with no open tendering for catering companies. Persad-Bissessar said World Bank officials were “horrified” with the Education Minis-try’s plans to technically upgrade secondary schools which had allegedly skyrocketed from $250 million to $700 million over a two-year period. She expressed horror at the levels of violence in the nation’s schools and charged the PNM with building “factories to put more criminals and drop outs on the street.” Persad-Bissessar then dropped a bombshell when she claimed that Manning had recently agreed to a proposal that only the first 1,000 children who sit this year’s Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) examination would be able to attend their first choice school while the remainder will be “distributed by lottery.”

The UNC MP also claimed there was corruption in the awarding of contracts for school repairs and security. She charged the PNM for depleting monies in the Dollar for Dollar programme from $240 million (2001) to $185.5 million (2003) and scrapping a unit within the Education Ministry to deal with pre-service teacher training. Persad-Bissessar said the PNM had to date, only used ten percent of a US $107 million World Bank loan for the Secondary Education Modernisation Programme (SEMP) and all the schools opened to date were built by the UNC. During several parts of her contribution, Persad-Bissessar seemed to be short of breath, causing her fellow MPs to express their concern for her health.