Dear Editor,
The mission statement of the Ministry of Education & Technical & Vocational Training is “to provide ALL persons in The Bahamas an opportunity to receive a quality education in an interdependent, CHANGING world”. I cannot think of a more true example than the world we live in today.
However, despite the cries and concerns of so many parents, teachers and students, children are still not back in the classrooms.
The holdup seems to be the Ministry of Health and Wellness. They will not give approval to MOE to let children back to school. Yet The Bahamas can receive thousands of tourists a day, fill the hotels, and let people shop at malls, go to the gym, dance at nightclubs and eat at restaurants. But, according to them, it’s too dangerous for schools with proper procedures and policies in place to have learners on site.
So, we sit at home in isolation. Deteriorating. Watching our children morph into zombies staring at screens for six hours a day. The effort of encouraging our children to go outside and play now seems awfully ironic as they are forced to “tune in”. Government schools have not had a live lesson in almost two years — many of those kids will fall into the gap, concluding their journey of learning. Why is nobody doing anything to open the schools?
The Ministry of Education has responsibility for more than 50,000 K-12 students in 170 institutions in The Bahamas, as of 2019.
Let me repeat. 50,000 students.
No one is in a classroom.
I would also like to add that one of the ministry’s goals is to raise the graduation rate from 50 percent. How do they plan to accomplish this if they can’t even host a school day?
Office of the Prime Minister, can you not see clearly? This is a crisis. This is our future. We are one of the last six countries in the world to still have not returned to face-to-face learning.
No more politics; no more agendas. Enough. If we can’t do it on our own, please be big enough to reach out to the rest of the world and ask for help. This country depends on it.
Laureen
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