Port of Spain – Jasour – News Desk
After a little over two months into the new school term, parents of some students attending special needs schools are worried that soon they will not have a place to send their children. This, they said, could be the reality if the schools did not receive government funding that was due to them. Members of the Private Special Schools Association of Trinidad and Tobago gathered outside the Education Ministry yesterday with the hopes of highlighting how dire their situation was.
We need someone who will pick up our plight, who would take us seriously because in a situation like this, there’s no one that we can talk to. The people that process our documents, they are not the ones in charge of writing the cheque for releasing the funds so there are other entities that we cannot reach that we are reaching out to,” Principal of Strategic Learning and Special Education Institute Susan De Freitas said. She said without funding, the schools could not pay their staff and would ultimately have to close. “We cannot be treated as though these children deserve less,” she said.
Principal of Charis Works Christian Academy, Linnea Sampath-Chai received funding but still showed up in support of other special needs schools. She said she had been without government funding before and believes that there needed to be more sensitisation on why timely funding was necessary. “We don’t want to be looking like we are always fighting for money, but it takes a lot to run the schools and keep the children engaged and properly provided for,” Sampath-Chai said.
Association member and Principal of Paideuo Learning Centre Judith de Verteuil said there were only so many fundraisers they could conduct and the subvention from the ministry was critical to their survival. “It means that you probably have to close the school for a week or two, it means that staff have to stay home, which affects the teacher-to-student ratio—you cannot maintain that when you don’t get funding to pay the teachers to come out,” she said. Parent of New Beginnings Educational Centre Simone Williams said she had been helping at the school as teachers could not afford to come out.
