TIME FOR TTUTA RETHINK

New TTUTA President Clyde Permell’s threat to adopt “extreme measures”, if necessary, to ensure that teachers still owed their increments receive their money would have been more palatable had it been accompanied by a promise of similar measures to ensure optimum teacher productivity. Permell has done injustice to the otherwise admirable tacit policy position of TTUTA’s new Executive which he unfolded at his installation as president on Monday. Permell’s declaration that there were “serious challenges ahead” which the new Executive intended to “meet head on and overcome in the interest of teachers, and by extension the students, who will benefit” cannot be faulted.

Nonetheless, the challenges — security at the nation’s schools, settling the increments matter, completing the Professional Management Appraisal Process, (continuous assessment process), negotiations on the fringe benefits for teachers and construction of teachers’ centres in Trinidad and Tobago — could have been strengthened by the inclusion of teacher indifference, teacher absenteeism, dress and behaviour. They constitute serious minuses and while, admittedly, teachers, who may be guilty of such abuses tend to be in the minority they are, however, problems that need to be addressed by Permell and his Executive with a sense of urgency. There have been uncomfortable reports in the past of some teachers, who while they were supposed to be at school were taking degree courses at the University of the West Indies, or who had signed on for work and gone their merry way leaving students unsupervised and, ipso facto, untaught.

In addition, there have been reports of some teachers turning up for work with alcohol tainted breaths, or of others who have sought and/or gained intimacy with students or whose ability to impart to and motivate students has been in question. Does Permell intend to take extreme measures to excise this cancer, measures which clearly will be in the interest of the teaching profession and by extension the student population? Meanwhile, the new Executive of TTUTA (Trinidad and Tobago Unified Teachers’ Association) should, in continuing discussions with the Ministry of Education begun by the previous Executive, emphasise the benefits to students and, ultimately, the country of finalising the Professional Management Appraisal Process, schools’ security and construction of teachers’ centres.

The settling of the increments issue is, undoubtedly, a matter of priority. It is nothing short of a scandal that 200 teachers (and former teachers) still remain without their 1987-1995 increments which today could have been earning them dividends in mutual funds, shares on the stock market, interest in the bank or have been used as part down payments on real estate. There have been horror stories by teachers in obtaining increments due to them. In one instance, payment was not made because a clerk at the Ministry of Education, although forwarding a cheque to the individual’s bank, did not include the account number of the beneficiary.

There were three depositors at the bank with the same name, and the cheque had to be returned to the Education Ministry, when officials were reported to have told the bank that they could do nothing about it! Yet even with all the minuses associated with the paying out of the arrears of increments, Permell’s talk of “extreme measures” to ensure that teachers received their increments would have been more acceptable had he warned of proposed similar tactics to ensure optimum teacher commitment to the upgrading of the efficiency of the nation’s schoolchildren.