With urgent repairs at the Vauxhall Primary School set to begin today, classes have been suspended for the remainder of the week.
Minister of Education Santia Bradshaw made the announcement today, following a tour of the Christ Church institution this morning, after outraged parents complained about unsanitary conditions at the school, which they said seemed to be getting students and teachers sick.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, the majority of the 24 teachers did not report for school.
This morning, the school’s Parent Teacher Association (PTA), which sent correspondence to the Ministry of Education outlining the issues, staged a quiet protest outside of the school, before joining the officials on the tour.
The Minister said closing the school for the next two days would allow workmen who carried out inspections today, to start repairs.
In the meantime, she said, the ministry would have to make determinations on whether students would have to be relocated to accommodate repairs to the bathroom facilities, which she said was being treated as a priority.
Minister of Education Santia Bradshaw (left) shaking hands with PTA president at Vauxhall Primary School Adrian Husbands.
“The Ministry of Education would have been aware of some issues at the school. I think many of you would be aware that many of these issues are not new, but equally they are of deep concern to several of the parents and students and indeed to the ministry.
“We had started the process in December of having the personnel along with environmental health visit the school with the view to identifying areas of priority so that we would be able to acquire the finances to start the work that was necessary to be carried out.
“We would have started with some plumbing issues that would have been developing over the past few months. There were issues in terms of blockage of the system. We started to address those,” Bradshaw said.
The Minister said over the course of the next couple days, the area where the garbage is being kept would be properly secured, the fence repaired and broken windows replaced.
She added that while the staff members and the association also raised concerns about the presence of mould in some of the classrooms, those rooms identified would be sealed appropriately to address the issue.
“There is a lot of work that would have to be done in terms of interior partitions as well, but I think we have agreed with the association that we would do that in a phased process to avoid any major disruption of the school. The school has a rodent problem, in the area obviously around the garbage receptacle.
“Rodents will find places where there are spaces for them to breed and we accept that underneath some of the prefab buildings, you have a lot of garbage under the building.
“We want to be able to pull out a lot of the garbage and then find a sealing material, perhaps through wire, to be able to seal the areas to prevent additional garbage from coming underneath the building and certainly creating a breeding ground for the rats as well,” she said.
Bradshaw said that generally, the structure has not had any significant renovations for a long period except for the repairs to the nutrition room last summer. She confirmed that Vauxhall Primary would be included in this year’s Domestic Summer Programme.
“With that in mind, one of the major issues for me certainly has been the bathroom facilities. These we wanted to do within the Domestic Summer Programme, but the state of the bathrooms given the roll, there is only one main bathroom for girls and boys and I feel very strongly that we need to address this urgently. Now, it is likely that the work would normally take about two weeks and we are in discussions with the contractors as to how we can possibly seek to bring that time down, in terms of maybe a week or so,” she said.
President of the School’s PTA Adrian Husbands thanked the Minister and her team for participating in the tour and for putting plans in place to immediately address the vexing issues.
anestahenry@barbadostoday.bb
