THE Trinidad and Tobago Unified Teachers’ Association (TTUTA) said the problems affecting the Moruga Secondary School include feuding gangs, overworked educators, and a lack of security, among others.
He called on the Education Ministry to provide the school with the resources to deal with these issues.
TTUTA president Martin Lum Kin said the union visited the school on April 9 and received a variety of reports from teachers.
He said teachers were not trained to deal with the students, many of whom Lum Kin claimed performed poorly in the Secondary Entrance Assessment (SEA) examinations.
“The Ministry of Education over the last few years has been assigning children who made under 30 per cent in the SEA examination to this school. Students come from as far as Princes Town. Many of the students have underlying issues and challenges, ranging from special-education needs, domestic challenges to social and psychosocial issues.”
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He said there had been no attempts by the ministry to assign the relevant resources to the school.
“The teachers who were not trained to deal with these situations have to fend for themselves. While there is one officer to deal with restorative practice, that officer is overwhelmed and overworked because of the number of cases she has to attend to.”
Lum Kin said the union was told the initial complement of seven security officers had been reduced to three officers and sometimes less, depending on the situation at other schools in the area.
He said a lack of furniture is hampering the proper delivery of the curriculum.
“This is not an enabling environment for the teaching and learning process. Classrooms do not have adequate cooling equipment and it was noticed that only one of the AC (aire conditioning) units in the staffroom was working.”
Lum Kin said there were a number of vacancies at the school, especially in the technical and vocational educational areas.
“These vacancies have not been filled for a number of years. Lab assistants, farm assistants and other technical personnel are not assigned to the school, which severely hampers the delivery of that particular area of the curriculum.”
He said TTUTA was told that feuding gangs attempted to settle their differences on the school compound, and some of those gang members were students of the school.
Lum Kin said the Education Ministry expected the educators to deal with those issues without giving them the proper resources.
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“To make matters worse, the ministry has not been addressing the individual matters of these educators at the Moruga Secondary School. Many of them have outstanding incremental arrears and attempts to have the ministry address them seem to be going nowhere.
“This, along with other factors, has been negatively affecting the morale and job satisfaction of the educators at this institution. It must be noted that these educators have been performing at the best level that they can, however, they seem to be abandoned by the officials of the Ministry of Education.”
The visit came in the wake of a viral video which saw a male teacher at the school defending a female student during an attack by a schoolmate.
