Rhon­da Krys­tal Ram­bal­ly

Pres­i­dent of the T&T Uni­fied Teach­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) Rous­tan Job con­demns Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh's state­ments that all ex­tra-cur­ric­u­lar ac­tiv­i­ties, sport­ing and cor­po­rate spon­sored events have to cease with im­me­di­ate ef­fect in all schools dur­ing school hours. Job said he hoped the min­is­ter would re­con­sid­er his state­ments and "al­low good sense to pre­vail." He said such ac­tiv­i­ties were crit­i­cal to the de­vel­op­ment of an all-round­ed in­di­vid­ual. "The Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter is tread­ing on very thin ice," Job said.

"A well-round­ed in­di­vid­ual is one who is able to mix both aca­d­e­mics and ex­tra-cur­ric­u­lar ac­tiv­i­ties. "TTUTA con­demns the ban on ex­tra-cur­ric­u­lar and co-cur­ric­u­lar ac­tiv­i­ties. They form an in­te­gral part of a stu­dent's school life." On Wednes­day at the Na­tion­al Con­sul­ta­tion on the Pri­ma­ry School Cur­ricu­lum held at the Cas­ca­dia Ho­tel in St Ann's, Gopsee­ingh said: "All these cor­po­rate bod­ies who want to have a spelling bee com­pe­ti­tion here and a de­bat­ing so­ci­ety there and you're tak­ing the chil­dren with the teach­ers out of school time. "I think that should be a thing of the past, so I have be­come au­to­crat­ic in this re­spect," he said. "I have in­di­cat­ed that with im­me­di­ate ef­fect, prob­a­bly about three weeks or four weeks ago, I ceased all of that."

Gopeesingh had first made the state­ments on March 9 at a press con­fer­ence held at his min­istry's of­fice in St Clair. Job said peo­ple were as­tound­ed and as far as he was aware, no one sup­port­ed the min­is­ter's com­ments. He called on the min­is­ter "to do your home­work" be­fore mak­ing such state­ments in pub­lic. Job al­so ques­tioned the par­tic­i­pa­tion of cor­po­rate en­ti­ties which he said have as­sist­ed schools through­out the years. "Who would have spon­sored those events? Some of those cor­po­rate bod­ies have been fill­ing the gap with lack of fund­ing in many schools." he said. He added that shift­ing the ac­tiv­i­ties to week­ends was un­fair to teach­ers and stu­dents.