SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

Al­though the T&T Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (T&TU­TA) con­tin­ues to voice its dis­ap­proval of the Au­gust 20 Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment (SEA) date, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia says he is putting his faith in teach­ers to pre­pare their stu­dents for the ex­am.

Gar­cia made the com­ment dur­ing a tour yes­ter­day at the Aranguez North Sec­ondary, where he met with the school’s prin­ci­pal to en­sure prepa­ra­tions were be­ing made for the Caribbean Sec­ondary Ed­u­ca­tion Cer­tifi­cate (CSEC) ex­am­i­na­tions in Ju­ly.

Asked to com­ment on the on­go­ing dis­pute be­tween the min­istry and T&TU­TA over the SEA date, Gar­cia said, “Let me make the point that that ex­am is sched­uled for Au­gust 20, there is ab­solute­ly no way where we are go­ing to change that date. I see in some as­pects of the me­dia that that date is still up in the air. I want to make it abun­dant­ly clear that Au­gust 20 is the date when our 19,000 stu­dents in the pri­ma­ry school sec­tion will be writ­ing the SEA ex­am­i­na­tion.”

Gar­cia said he was con­fi­dent teach­ers will do what is nec­es­sary to pre­pare their charges for the ex­am de­spite their mis­giv­ings over the date. “I am bank­ing on the good­will of our teach­ers. Our teach­ers have al­ways shown good­will where our stu­dents are con­cerned, as I have been say­ing, there is an emo­tion­al bond be­tween a teacher and his/her class and I am sure our teach­ers will not want to break that bond or do any­thing that will in­ter­fere with the con­fi­dence of our stu­dents,” he said.

Gar­cia said the pur­pose of the tour, which en­com­passed one pri­ma­ry and one sec­ondary school in the sev­en ed­u­ca­tion­al dis­tricts, was to en­sure schools are ready for the ex­ams.

“Of course there are some chal­lenges and this is one of the rea­sons why we are in­sist­ing on our vis­its, so we can dis­cuss with the prin­ci­pals the is­sues that con­cern them,” he said, not­ing the min­istry is work­ing to en­sure any is­sues are rec­ti­fied in time for the ex­ams.

Gar­cia said the Stu­dent Sup­port Di­vi­sion has al­so been reach­ing out to stu­dents and par­ents to en­sure the stu­dents’ well-be­ing ahead of the ex­ams.

“They are very much on the ball, they are li­ais­ing with schools and even par­ents be­cause some of our of­fi­cers are vis­it­ing homes of par­ents in an ef­fort to en­sure that stu­dents are com­fort­able.”

Guardian Me­dia tried con­tact­ing T&TU­TA pres­i­dent An­to­nia De Fre­itas but calls to her cell­phone went unan­swered yes­ter­day.