Email

Print

But, what we didn't know is that - according to the Ministry of Education - Graham Creek - incredibly - was not included in the list of schools that qualified for hardship. The last hardship list, compiled in the year 2000 does not include that school - but the revision this year - does include it. The Deputy Chief Education Officer explained today in Belmopan:...

Cecilia Ramirez-Smith, Deputy Chief Education Officer
"You saw the images on your trip yesterday. Graham Creek is in a very distant area of our country. Teachers do need to travel great distances and under some very dire circumstances to get there. What I can say now at point is that given the review that we did earlier in the year during the period April to June, we were able to include Graham Creek on the hardship list and they have been categorized as category 1. They'd been put in category 1, because category 1 is the set of schools that would meet at least 6-7 of the hardship conditions that we described. I can't explain why Graham Creek was not on the list before. But clearly we know, the Ministry of Education knows and understand these circumstances that teachers have to work with. We've been to those schools. Our team in Toledo does spot checks in every school in the country. In the beginning we used to do it once per year. Now we are doing that twice per year. We do other forms of supervision to support schools and so we know what these teachers have to go through and so when we were doing the review this year, we could not see why Graham Creek should have been on the list before. So they are on the list now and the teachers there will begin to get the hardship allowance that is awarded every month."

Of course, those Graham Creek teachers will now have to wait until October - since the new hardship list is now held up up pending another review:…

Cecilia Ramirez-Smith, Deputy Chief Education Officer
"We have invited the stakeholders, the union and the general managers association to provide some additional information. In terms of their recommendations. Having seen the final list, we've invited them to share with us if there are any changes, if there are any adjustments they think we need to make, because the whole process was very meticulous - very time consuming. We could have missed something and so given this whole upset in the process, we thought that it is only fair to give them another chance to look at the whole list again. We do expect to have the list in place for October. So we are not anticipating that this process will be drawn out for the rest of this school year or anything like that and it is important for them to understand that."

We also learned today that there are plans and funding to build a 55 thousand dollar teachers quarters building at the Graham Creek government school. The teachers presently have to sleep in the school.