Education Minister says decision soon on plans for school next year

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Education Minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly has promised that an announcement will be made soon regarding the plan for academic Term II, which is due to begin on January 3, 2022.

Indicating this as she responded to questions about yesterday’s meeting with the Trinidad and Tobago Unified Teachers Association (TTUTA), the Minister said the session was productive and had concluded with several written recommendations being submitted to the Ministry of Education.

She said, “TTUTA provided written recommendations and raised concerns about the operations of Term 2, the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) date and the management of COVID matters at schools.”

She assured, “These issues were fully ventilated.”

Gadsby-Dolly said now that all education stakeholders had been consulted, “The MoE will present recommendations for consideration to the Prime Minister, and it is expected that the final decisions regarding the operations of Term 2 2021/22 will be announced shortly.”

Term I officially ended yesterday, with thousands of primary and secondary school students proceeding on three weeks of Christmas vacation.

After almost 19 months at home since schools were closed in March 2020 after this country’s first COVID-19 case was confirmed, students in Forms Four to Six returned to the physical classroom on October 25.

And while online classes continued for all other students—the return to face to face classes was not without its own set of setbacks, as more than a dozen private and public secondary schools recorded COVID-19 cases.

This led to more than 100 people, including teachers, students and auxiliary staff, having to quarantine.

Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley is hoping students in Forms One to Three will join their peers in the classroom from January, but this will depend on the advice from the Ministry of Health.