Angry parents want new Oropouche school

AT LEAST three schools in South Trinidad remained closed yesterday, the first day of the new term, with angry parents staging a protest outside one of the closed schools. Parents whose children attend the South Oropouche Government Primary School staged a brief but noisy protest outside the incomplete structure which has been earmarked as the site for the new school.

The irate parents said officials of the Education Ministry had promised the school would be built in time for the new term, but yesterday when they accompanied their children to the site, they saw tractors and heavy machinery lying idle outside the building. With no school possible since the building is incomplete, the angry parents vented their frustrations in the form of a protest. They are demanding that Education Minister Hazel Manning fulfil her obligations to the Oropouche community by having the school completed as soon as possible.

Fyzabad MP Chandresh Sharma told Newsday on numerous occasions prior to the start of the new school term, the Ministry promised Oropouche residents they would have a new school. “The completion of the school was first promised to us after the Easter vacation, then it was pushed forward to July before the closure of the school term, then we were told it would be ready for September . . . and now it is still to be completed,” Sharma said. Newsday understands the school, which initially housed 500 students, saw a drop in enrollment to just 200 students after the original school, which was built in the late 1800s was demolished and the rebuilding process started in 1998 under the then UNC administration. According to Sharma, when the UNC left office in 1998, the school was 87 percent complete.