As re­pair works con­tin­ue at 27 sec­ondary schools, the Cab­i­net has ap­proved an ad­di­tion­al 15 schools to re­ceive full re­pair and re­fur­bish­ment works.

This was an­nounced by Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly dur­ing a me­dia con­fer­ence at her min­istry’s head of­fice on St Vin­cent Street, Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day.

She said the re­pair works at these 42 schools will cost a to­tal of $411 mil­lion which will see com­pre­hen­sive works be­ing done.

The min­is­ter said due to the ex­ten­sive na­ture of the re­pairs, they would not be com­plet­ed be­fore the end of Christ­mas va­ca­tion, adding that while ap­proval was giv­en yes­ter­day, find­ing a con­trac­tor to do the work had just be­gun.

Gads­by-Dol­ly al­so re­port­ed that out of the 800 pub­lic schools in Trinidad and To­ba­go, 53 schools were old­er than 100 years old, 195 schools were be­tween 60 and 99 years old, and 125 schools were be­tween 40 and 59 years old.

She added that one of the chal­lenges in up­grad­ing an age­ing school stock was to ini­ti­ate thor­ough re­pairs which could lead to more long-last­ing struc­tures to pre­vent wastage of re­sources.

“We have tak­en steps to un­der­take com­pre­hen­sive re­pair at some of our schools. Some of our old­er schools are in se­ri­ous con­di­tion and need that com­pre­hen­sive ap­proach be­cause if we don’t do that, what we end up with is fix­ing and patch­ing and we are al­ways in a state of con­tin­u­ous re­pair to some schools and it re­al­ly gets us nowhere,” she ex­plained.

In ad­di­tion to these re­pairs, Gads­by-Dol­ly al­so high­light­ed emer­gency re­pairs were ex­pect­ed to be done at schools to pre­vent clo­sure.

She said the Gov­ern­ment an­tic­i­pat­ed spend­ing at least $300 mil­lion on these re­pairs which usu­al­ly in­clud­ed sew­er­age, plumb­ing or elec­tri­cal works and pos­si­ble falling con­crete slabs.

She said be­tween 2021 and 2023, the Gov­ern­ment spent just over $1 bil­lion on in­fra­struc­tur­al re­pairs.

The Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter al­so re­port­ed that sev­en schools were in the process of be­ing re­paired, at least four of which were ex­pect­ed to be opened by the end of the year.