Richard Lord

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh says he is mov­ing to have the aban­doned Biche High School opened at the start of the new school year in Sep­tem­ber.Gopeesingh said that in an in­ter­view with the T&T Guardian, af­ter a tour of the new Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion Tow­ers on St Vin­cent Street, Port of Spain, yes­ter­day.

The build­ing was one of the mul­ti-mil­lion projects con­struct­ed by the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go. There have been al­leged cost over­runs in the project. Asked to com­ment on the Biche High School, Gopeesingh said he had asked his per­ma­nent sec­re­tary to send a team from the Ed­u­ca­tion Fa­cil­i­ties Com­pa­ny (EF­CL) to "clean up the area as quick­ly as pos­si­ble." He said he was look­ing at the re­port on the Biche High School "and most like­ly I will be tak­ing a note to Cab­i­net on that is­sue for pos­si­ble re­open­ing of the school in Sep­tem­ber." Gopeesingh said the school was con­struct­ed by the for­mer UNC gov­ern­ment "and it should have been opened a num­ber of years ago and thou­sands of stu­dents have been left to suf­fer as a re­sult of the non-open­ing of that school and this can­not con­tin­ue any­more."

The school was con­struct­ed in 2001 and was not opened be­cause of cer­tain safe­ty is­sues. The for­mer Patrick Man­ning-led gov­ern­ment had set up a com­mis­sion of en­quiry in­to the con­struc­tion of the $30-mil­lion school. It was chaired by Jus­tice Annes­tine Sealy. The 72-page re­port rec­om­mend­ed that: There must be a prop­er as­sess­ment of the soil con­di­tions to ad­dress the is­sue of wa­ter in the soil un­der­min­ing the sup­port of the foun­da­tions. Struc­tur­al en­gi­neers should look at the in­tegri­ty of the present struc­tures, whether the mea­sures which have been sug­gest­ed in the past have any val­ue and the cause of the cracks in the build­ing. There should be con­tin­u­ous air mon­i­tor­ing un­der the su­per­vi­sion and di­rec­tion of the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Agency and/or the Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion.