School Boards

The Ministry of Education’s plan to have School Boards at all of the 86 Government secondary schools in Trinidad and Tobago can prove effective, if the right persons are chosen. This would help to change growing negative attitudes in the students providing the boards seek to involve the respective communities served by the schools. Individual Boards may be able to achieve this by maintaining close contact with the Parent-Teacher Associations (PTA) of their schools as well as establish advisory committees headed by members and on which PTA members selected by their associations will sit.

In addition, every quarter or at least twice a year the School Boards should invite members of the PTA as well as of the general community to attend (School) Board meetings and participate actively. In this way the School Boards will not only get a feedback from the teachers, parents and general community but would be viewed as being active and interested in the concerns of the three groups. For School Boards to be effective they cannot be seen as aloof from the very people whose attitudes can impact positively on the schoolchildren.

There are scores of teachers with ideas of how to make learning more attractive to students. There are concerned parents who liaise with their children on a regular basis, and their demonstrated interest in the welfare of their children embraces both supervising their homework and encouraging frank discussions with them on the problems they face at school. These concerns can be drawn to the attention of teachers at PTA meetings with suggestions as to how they can be addressed, for example absentee teachers, disruptive students and/or classrooms which are not properly ventilated to give one example.

The concerns can later be raised at regular or specially called meetings of the advisory committees of the Board. Opposition Senator Roy Augustus in the debate in the Senate on Tuesday on the Education Local School Boards (Amendments) Regulations, 2005, stated that some of the political appointees to existing School Boards had sought to override the duties of principals.

A School Board seeking to do this will only serve to antagonise the principal and staff and confuse parents of children attending the school. It is a negative approach that should be discouraged. One of the first things that a School Board should establish is a public relations policy which would determine not only what it would seek to communicate to the community it serves and how the information would be communicated, but how it deals with the principal and staff. Any School Board which acts as Senator Augustus has warned does not appreciate its role.