Quries onshortened term for students

THE EDITOR: Open letter to Minister of Education Anthony Garcia.

I humbly request your assistance. I know you have many important matters to handle, but no one from the district office, head office, EFCL or EFPPD has been able to assist.

Specifically, what’s left of a primary school student’s education when, of the 15 weeks in term one, six (and counting) are subtracted due to a sewer issue?

What’s left when, for six weeks (beginning in week four of the term; it’s week ten now), nothing has been done to prevent students below Standard 4 falling behind? What’s left when no one can provide a start date, but repairs are expected to take about a week to complete?

How will teachers fit six weeks of education into whatever’s left whenever Jerningham Government Primary School is fixed? How will students catch up to their peers whose studies weren’t interrupted by sewage spewing from a decades-old system?

Would you, as a former principal, have allowed your school to sit empty and covered in excrement while your students went uneducated for six weeks? Would you have done whatever was necessary to ensure their education was secure? Will you do something for the young students now suffering? Is that kind of expediency not reserved for them?

I ask you because multiple officials in your departments responsible for fixing this informed me in various ways that they don’t answer to me. They answer to you, though.

CALISA PAULSON via e-mail