Rallying with all pupils

He engaged with pupils, parents and teachers from 20 primary and five secondary schools in the area at the School Improvement Project Rally on Wednesday at the Queen’s Park Savannah, a pilot project to be rolled out eventually to other parts of the country. Rowley rightly told the pupils to have high expectations of themselves.

“Once you tell yourself what you want to be, let nobody tell you that you can’t get there because of where you are from,” he advised. “All of you know me as the Prime Minister but I wasn’t always the Prime Minister.

I was just like you, probably even worse off.” Citing the event’s mantra, “I am the change”, he said pupils must positively influence their communities, just as their parents and teachers are working very hard for them.

“Where there is indiscipline it will require resources to deal with it,” he warned. “Every act of indiscipline, whether it is breaking a window or taking up a gun, requires a consumption of resources to respond to it.” It is a laudable project that deserves all support, far and wide, and everyone concerned should be congratulated, and more than that, must work towards implementation all over Trinidad and Tobago. It is not a patronising exercise. It is supposed to boost school infrastructure, safety, parental involvement, and numeracy and literacy, much explained by Minister of State in the Ministry of Education, Dr Lovell Francis, previously to Newsday. “Fixing education is like juggling ten balls at the same time, but it has to be done,” he had remarked.

Francis said research shows a link between strong parental involvement with pupils and academic success. In that vein parents and school staff should maximise the use of channels of communication, such as participation in PTA and school boards, attendance at Parents Day and even by regularly communicating with teachers via the devices that are now commonplace among all young people.

The minister had also spoken of the key role played by a school principal, and we would certainly prescribe that these administrators share their best practice.

Francis explained the project further, saying, “So we are really trying to bolster the leadership at the school level by giving them a framework to manage their school and manage all of the tangibles and intangibles that make up a school.” While public attention is often grabbed by the nation’s high-fliers, Francis has pointed out the plight of some 3,500 pupils scoring below 30 percent in English and math in the recent Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) Exam.

“This is indeed far too large in vital areas of study, and the ministry is to be complimented for doing a ‘tracer’ to guide an intervention, targeting these students for literacy and numeracy, as well as following their progression through school.

“One of the things we’ve noticed at the primary level is that students who do poorly at Standard One are the same students who also do poorly at the SEA Exam in Standard Five.

There’s a direct correlation.” Regarding weak pupils entering secondary school, Francis proposed an intervention at Form One to boost literacy and numeracy and then trace their development in later years, so they don’t just “pass through” school.

“If you can read and count that is a platform for learning and development, but if you can’t read your secondary schooling is really lost on you.” We hope that the project with its goals of more parental involvement, better school administration, and remedial help for weaker pupils will not be impeded by the ministry’s reduced budget.

After all, University of the West Indies St Augustine deputy principal, Prof Rhoda Reddock, at a forum on Wednesday, said that a small expenditure on education today can avert a much bigger bill for law enforcement tomorrow. We concur and ask all concerned to take note.