The Ministry of Education on Monday faced pressure to provide more innovative learning environments for special needs students, with the nation’s two teachers’ unions calling for widespread implementation of state-of-the-art facilities, following the successful renovation of Alma Parris Academy.
The call followed a walk-through of the technical and vocational institution in Speightstown, St Peter. The government spent $1.2 million renovating what was previously the Alma Parris Memorial Secondary School to facilitate various skill-based programmes and create laboratories with commercial equipment.
The presidents of the Barbados Secondary Teachers’ Union (BSTU), Mary Redman, and the Barbados Union of Teachers, Rudy Lovell, said they wanted to see similar upgrades at other schools.
“We at the BSTU are extremely happy at the reopening of the school . . . . In its new incarnation it is even better, much better placed to deal with the deficits that so many of our children face,” said Redman. “We are happy about the curriculum. We are happy about the practical aspect of the implementation of the curriculum and how it is preparing the students for entrepreneurship activity and how it is preparing them to go back into mainstream education.
“We’re also happy about the fact that there is a certain amount of flexibility as it relates to constant appraisal of what is happening here with potential for modification.”
The BSTU president suggested that the government could budget for similar projects at other schools.
President of the Barbados Union of Teachers, Rudy Lovell. (HG)
“What we would, however, like to see, of course, is an expansion in terms of the role as soon as that is practically possible. And beyond that, I think what we would like to see is that certain schools that we know have a similar intake and that have low rolls right now, that money is spent in those schools providing similar possibilities that might prove to be less expensive to do than to build another Alma Parris type school because there is need for more than one institution of this type.
“We have schools with low rolls, similar intake and we do feel in the BSTU that money can be well spent in those schools developing this type of concept to meet the needs of our children, to equip them to be better citizens, to meet them where they are all in the education transformation process,” Redman added.
Darryl Jordan Secondary and St George Secondary were two schools that could benefit from such an initiative, she said.
Lovell suggested the creation of the academy showed that more could be done to ensure all students had a quality education.
“The BUT is extremely pleased with what we see at the Alma Parris Academy,” he said. “We are happy with the cosmetology lab and food preparation facility. Having raised the bar you cannot stop here; you must do the same for all the schools in Barbados.” (SZB)
The post Teachers’ unions push for more special needs spaces appeared first on Barbados Today.
