PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

More sinks and spaced out class­es will be a part of the new nor­mal for re­turn­ing stu­dents to schools.

Dur­ing a tour of Queen’s Roy­al Col­lege (QRC) yes­ter­day, Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion An­tho­ny Gar­cia was shown a cou­ple of class­rooms with spaced-out desks, while prin­ci­pal David Si­mon al­so con­firmed the school’s gym­na­si­um had been trans­formed to ac­com­mo­date CSEC/CAPE ex­am­i­na­tion stu­dents.

“We are al­ready in full gear prepar­ing for ex­ams. What we did, the room that you are present­ly in, is a room that will be used for ex­am­i­na­tions, you recog­nise that it has been so­cial­ly spaced for this par­tic­u­lar pur­pose,” said Si­mon in a brief press con­fer­ence in the gym­na­si­um fol­low­ing the tour.

“The class­room that we vis­it­ed is al­so so­cial­ly spaced as we get ready to or­gan­ise for ex­ams. And of course, we are al­ready work­ing on a plan based on the in­for­ma­tion that we get from the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion and all the oth­er agen­cies as to what will hap­pen in Sep­tem­ber that we anx­ious­ly await,” he said.

Dur­ing the tour, the QRC Prin­ci­pal al­so point­ed out ar­eas he had iden­ti­fied to house ex­am in­vig­i­la­tors and de­scribed plans to in­stall ad­di­tion­al sinks around to school.

“The prin­ci­pal has in­formed me that he will be in­stalling 20 ad­di­tion­al sinks and those sinks will be spread all around the school so the mo­ment the stu­dent leaves a class­room and goes to an­oth­er class­room he will have to op­por­tu­ni­ty to wash their hands so that when en­ters the class­room, he en­ters the class­room germ free,” said Min­is­ter Gar­cia.

He added: “Every school has what we re­fer to as drink­ing troughs, and in spite of the fact that QRC has a num­ber of drink troughs were stu­dents can have their wa­ter and they can wash their hands and so on, it was felt it was nec­es­sary at this school to have ad­di­tion­al sinks so, there­fore, QRC will be in­stalling ad­di­tion­al sinks.”

The Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter al­so clar­i­fied a state­ment con­cern­ing the num­ber of per­sons al­lowed to come to school for School-Based As­sess­ments.

He ex­plained that while groups larg­er than five will be al­lowed on the school com­pound, on­ly five per­sons would be al­lowed in a class­room at a time in keep­ing with pub­lic health reg­u­la­tions.

“We are ask­ing not more than five per­sons to be in a class­room at the same time.

“So this can be done on a ro­ta­tion­al ba­sis, a teacher, for ex­am­ple, can meet with a class of 25 but not at the same time,” he said.

The Min­is­ter al­so toured the St Patrick Girls RC School, al­so known as Nel­son Street Girls school as they pre­pared for stu­dents sit­ting the SEA ex­am but said there was still no con­firmed date for the Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment.