SHABBY TREATMENT OF QUEEN'S ROYAL

Queen's Royal College, once the premier secondary school in Trinidad and Tobago, and in its prime, one of the top in the English speaking Caribbean, is today the almost forgotten orphan of the Ministry of Education, in a state of almost unbelievable physical deterioration. It is a deterioration that must have impacted negatively of late on the academic performance of a school that in its heyday won all of the scholarships to Universities offered by Government. Its main building, poised to celebrate the centenary of its opening, in March of 2004, is desperately in need of repair. The building's once proud Hall, to which generations of students were summoned for daily morning prayers, and in which the Old Boys' Association held its annual dinner, has been virtually unused for years, and a class, formerly housed there has had to be shifted. The reason lies in the fear that large sections of the Hall's magnificent ceiling can come crashing down at any time. The problem is not an overnight one, but rather has been threatening for years, and the need for renovation work on Queen's Royal College has been the subject of many a newspaper article.

Yet Queen's Royal, a school that produced the nation's first Prime Minister, Dr Eric Williams, as well as its first Leader of the Opposition, Dr Rudranath Capildeo; its President, Professor George Maxwell Richards, and one of first (and current) Judges of the International Criminal Court, has been allowed by successive Administrations to slip into disrepair. It has received and still receives a recklessly shabby treatment that it does not deserve. Even its King Edward Memorial clock, a gift of an old boy and then prominent businessman, William Gordon-Gordon, and installed in 1913, and whose Big Ben chimes had been the pride of present and former students alike, stands still, not unlike the church clock of Rupert Brooke's Granchester. The clock, in much the same way as the college's main building and its great Hall, requires repairs. But its hands, by which scores of persons had set their watches, and the welcome sounds of its chimes will not be heard again until the money is found to effect the needed work. The reader's guess is as good as mine. Today, the main building of Queen's Royal College, one of the country's famous Magnificent Seven landmarks, is a sad simulacrum of what generations of Royalians knew, loved and honoured.

But apart from the massive repair work that clearly needs to be done, the Queen's Royal College Parent-Teacher Association has lamented that there is a shortfall of $625,000 of the $1,300,000 it has estimated is required annually for the School Improvement Programme (SIP). Of this figure, the Ministry of Education allocates $375,000; $50,000 is contributed by the QRC Old Boys’ Association; the QRC Foundation — $200,000, while $50,000 is raised by the college's PTA. What clearly is missing, or perhaps the phrase is lacking, in the equation, is a greater understanding by former students of Queen's Royal College. The Ministry of Education has failed to discharge its responsibility to Queen's Royal, and the blame for the rundown state of the College, the shabby treatment, is correctly placed at its doorstep. Had it acted much earlier, the volume and cost of repairs to Queen's Royal College today would have been understandably far less.

Admittedly, however, it has had to accommodate requests for the repairs and/or construction of several other secondary as well as primary schools. Nonetheless, to use an old saying: A stitch in time saves nine. On the other hand there are scores of former students of Queen's Royal, who can be tapped for contributions, corporate and personal, to the needed renovation programme. There is an Old Boys' network, with its fund of goodwill, which if properly targeted, can certainly result in millions of dollars being raised. The right marketing strategy will be needed, but Old Boys of Queen's Royal have come to the assistance of the College in the past, and undoubtedly can be expected to come to its rescue again. Should they do this, they should insist, however, that the Ministry of Education never allows again Queen's Royal College, one of the English speaking Caribbean's oldest secondary schools to physically deteriorate to the sorry stage it has reached today.