The repair programme ritual

Speculation and assumptions become the order of the day, with various stakeholders weighing in on the topic and excitement mounts as the countdown to the opening of school begins.

The Minister of Education suddenly becomes the focus of the media.

Visits to the various schools begin to assess the rate of progress of work and what emergency procedures must kick in to ensure that the deadlines are met.

Not to be excluded from the limelight are top officials of the Ministry of Education and the Education Facilities Company Ltd, complete in hard hats and construction gear.

Media personnel in their quest to spice up the otherwise bland issue seek the opinions of the Trinidad and Tobago Unified Teachers Association and the National Parent Teacher Association officials, in the hope that their comments/criticisms will help to make the headlines attractive.

While education is very important and critical to the development of the nation, one wonders if this attention and energy could not be put to more productive use. In its current configuration, the media frenzy serves the political purposes of the politician and an opportunity for political points to be scored.

No other stakeholder benefits from this arrangement, for it is traumatic and a sad indictment about the way we manage our education system.

This misplaced energy and attention can surely be put to engender system-wide improvement.

While acknowledging the satisfaction of the Ministry of Education in ensuring that all schools were able to reopen on time, Minister of State in the Ministry of Education Dr Lovell Francis made the poignant point that in the future we must find a way to do things differently. Like all other physical facilities, school plants must be subjected to a routine maintenance regime to ensure that its capacity be used to deliver curriculum by teachers is never in question. This must be one of the benchmarks of any quality education system.

Schools must have the capacity to engage in repair and improvement work during the course of the entire school year, with major renovation and plant overhaul being reserved for the July-August vacation.

Schools must be given the resources — both technical and financial — to ensure that minor repairs and routine maintenance do not morph into plant shutdowns and loss of teaching time.

Resources and expertise resident at the level of the school and district must be able to eliminate the need for frequent plant overhauls every July-August vacation period.

The convoluted bureaucratic and overly centralised system for repair requests from schools must be streamlined.

State agencies resident at the respective districts (regional, borough and city corporations and Ministry of Works) must also be encouraged and empowered to assist schools with some of these routine tasks.

Technically competent people must be readily accessible to school principals to assist in the process of facility management. It will also be prudent to ensure that all school principals are exposed to some measure of basic facility management training so that maintenance regimes are proactive and preventative.

If this approach to school repair is adopted it would eliminate the need for this unnecessary trauma and anxiety that the nation has grown accustomed to at the start of the academic year.

Here’s wishing all an enjoyable and productive year.