And while the Ministry of Education is working on lowering the cost of education, Faber told us that some schools are trying to do the opposite. According to Faber, certain school across the country are adding arbitrary fees to school tuition costs, and he told us that he is working on correcting this issue...
Hon. Patrick Faber, Minister of Education
"I am noticing that there are some primary schools, I'm not ready to call their names yet, we are engaging with their managements to ask them to desist from adding on additional fees to the primary school. There are primary schools in this city now especially who have taken the bill all the way up almost $200, while the actual registration fee is only about $70-$75. I've noted one school in particular that is adding on an activity fee or a kind of cultural activity fee of some sort of $80-$90. That is absolutely ridiculous and the ministry does not support that at all. In fact I don't believe that any primary school should be at that range. The more the government tries to bring down the cost of education as it relates to these fees - we have some schools that are trying to jack it up further and the government and the ministry will absolutely resist that. So where it comes to mind my attention I have asked the chief to call those managements and to deal with those matters and parents should take a stand as well. The only reason I see this is because the parents come to me with the bills asking for help, when in fact they should take a stand jointly against the school that's trying to fleece them so to speak, because while I understand education is expensive, we cannot continue to pressure our parents and our students to give more when in fact they simply cannot afford to do so."
While Faber did not call any names, he did mention that many of the perpetrators were schools in Belize City.
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