Rhon­da Krys­tal Ram­bal­ly

Two stud­ies done on the air qual­i­ty at the Biche High School have re­vealed that any con­t­a­m­i­na­tion is be­low de­tectable lev­el. Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh said the school will be opened on Sep­tem­ber 5 af­ter be­ing closed for 11 years. He said the last ad­min­is­tra­tion chose to close the school be­cause the air qual­i­ty was "bad" and that volatile, nox­ious agents were present.

Gopeesingh said clo­sure of the school forced stu­dents to trav­el for more than 20 miles to oth­er schools. He was ad­dress­ing the me­dia at the post–Cab­i­net news brief­ing at the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter in St Clair on Thurs­day. He said in June the Caribbean In­dus­tri­al Re­search In­sti­tute sub­mit­ted its re­port to the Ed­u­ca­tion­al Fa­cil­i­ties Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed af­ter con­duct­ing tests to mon­i­tor the air for volatile, or­gan­ic com­pounds and tox­ic gas­es. Gopeesingh said the re­sults in­di­cat­ed that the lev­els of all pa­ra­me­ters mon­i­tored were with­in the re­spec­tive, ac­cept­able guide­lines.

The sec­ond study was done by Rose En­vi­ron­men­tal Ltd. Gopeesingh said the re­sults re­vealed that the air qual­i­ty of five sta­tions mon­i­tored were con­sis­tent with "good, qual­i­ty, fresh air" at the time the study was done last year. He said 40 pupils who wrote the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment were placed in Form One. Gopeesingh said he was ad­vised by his per­ma­nent sec­re­tary that a prin­ci­pal and teach­ers were se­lect­ed. He said $30 mil­lion was spent on ren­o­va­tions and re­pairs.