USING STUDENTS AS PAWNS

The threatened indefinite closure of the Miracle Ministries Pentecostal High School in Chase Village, Chaguanas, from Monday until the Principal, Omar Ali, is transferred will be the second time in less than a month that students will have been used as pawns in a difficult situation. The first was the industrial action taken by the West Indies Group of University Teachers (WIGUT), including on and off withdrawal of enthusiasm, to apply pressure on Government to grant University of the West Indies, St Augustine campus lecturers demanded increases in salaries and perks. The fundamental difference between the two is that while the UWI St Augustine campus administration merely appeared sympathetic to WIGUT’s action, the Miracle Ministries Pentecostal High School Board plans to close the school and deny the children the right to education. In addition, the closure was neither a strategy initiated by the teachers nor their representatives.

Already, the Ministry of Education has warned that any closure of the school will be in contravention of the Education Act, and has instructed the Board not to go ahead with its tacit challenge to the Act. Any closure of a school is bad, but coming as it does mere months before students are due to begin to write the CXC Ordinary Level examinations will impose needless stress on them. This will mean that, should any closure be prolonged, the relevant students will not have access to required coaching to help them prepare adequately for the examinations. Other students hoping to move up to CXC O’Level for the 2005-2006 School Year beginning in September, also will be at a severe disadvantage. This means that the future of both sets of students, particularly those due to sit the CXC examinations in a few months, and based on their ability to pass the exams, may be under siege.

What makes the Board of Management’s action pathetically absurd is that the machinery to have the school’s Principal, Ali, transferred is already in motion, and it is only Public Service bureaucracy that is holding it up. Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Angela Jack, stressed on Thursday that the Education Ministry had denounced the action. The demand for Ali’s transfer is said to have arisen as a result of a dispute over religious beliefs. Pastor Winston Cuffie, Chairman of the school’s Board of Management, offered that an issue arose with the Principal over the practice of the Pentecostal religious beliefs. But surely this matter could have been settled without resorting to closure of the school. The signal which the Board of Management may be sending out to the youngsters, however inadvertently, is that should their wishes not be complied with as quickly as they would like, then they can take unilateral action even if it is to the detriment of others. This is hardly a suitable example to set persons of an impressionable age, or indeed of any age.

It will be in the interest of all concerned, should the Board of Management reconsider its somewhat rash decision. The Ministry of Education should proceed with dispatch to have the matter resolved amicably. The alternative is that the education of 300 students of the Miracle Ministries Pentecostal High School will either be suspended indefinitely or that the Education Ministry runs the risk of traumatising the student population through implementing the big stick methods inferred in the breach of the Education Act threat.