Building upkeep and maintenance key to education reform

If nothing else, recent developments have shown us that any talk or consideration being given to education reform must have the state of the physical plant in priority planning.

In the past several weeks, several schools across the island, including Ann Hill, Lester Vaughan, St John’s Primary and Luther Thorne Memorial Primary, have made headlines as teachers and parents protested environmental issues that have been affecting those educational institutions for years.

In particular, the environmental issues at St John’s Primary and Luther Thorne Memorial Primary speak volumes. It doesn’t take a scholar to tell us that these two sagas have negatively impacted the delivery of education at those rural and urban locations.

Students at Luther Thorne Memorial in Wildey, St Michael were not in the classrooms this week, even though the ministry insisted that the majority of the work to be addressed at the school, where teachers and parents complained of environmental problems, had been completed. Several parents had insisted they would not be sending their children back to the school for the remainder of the term. 

St John’s Primary, we learned late last night, is now closed “indefinitely” and students are being reallocated to Mount Tabor Primary in Sherbourne.

The Ministry of Education insisted in a statement, however, that the decision “was not as a result of environmental tests, but rather the collective costs incurred over the years without getting the desired results”.

Whatever the reason, various stakeholders welcomed the move, including the parent-teacher association and the Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT).

The union’s president, Rudy Lovell, said: “The BUT is extremely excited that the students and teachers at the St John’s Primary School would be relieved of the environmental issues that have been plaguing the school for so many years.”

It is sad that drastic measures, such as staying off the job, have had to be taken to get the message across.

What is also sad is that we can predict that by the start of the Hilary term in January, we are likely to hear of issues arising at other schools.

In a news report published in Barbados TODAY this week, Professor Dwayne Devonish, a University of the West Indies lecturer on organisational behaviour, management and workplace performance and productivity, suggested that a detailed environmental safety audit be conducted at each school to determine the extent to which the facilities require maintenance.

He said that just like other government buildings, schools were subject to below-par maintenance and this was the key reason the institutions, as well as their occupants, were falling sick.

Professor Devonish explained: “What you would find with sick building syndrome is that this particular syndrome has been haunting Barbadian public spaces because of insufficient or inadequate maintenance response. . . .  It’s not just the consistency of maintenance that matters, but it’s the coverage and the comprehensiveness of the maintenance. No two schools are alike. But if you have what we call a kind of a generic maintenance schedule or programme which probably looks at cleaning and repairing or servicing certain items.

“So, instead of acting in a kind of reactive way, as what we are seeing now, you should be proactively conducting what is typically called environmental safety audits. These audits look at the specific environmental risks and hazards for different buildings or different school facilities and determine what unique and common areas of risks and hazards exist. And then you specifically treat those problem areas.”

Professor Devonish is proposing a more proactive approach, rather than a reactive one. His suggestions, among others, should be part and parcel of any serious document going forward.

They should be taken into consideration and acted upon by those tasked with carving out our much-touted education reform policy.