RAD­HI­CA DE SIL­VA

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia Re­porter

rad­hi­ca.sookraj@guardian.co.tt

De­spite re­ports of low at­ten­dance at sev­er­al pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary schools yes­ter­day, both the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion and the Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) said they are un­aware of any or­gan­ised sick­out by teach­ers up­set over de­layed back­pay pay­ments.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia, TTUTA pres­i­dent Crys­tal Bevin Ashe said the union had not sanc­tioned any in­dus­tri­al ac­tion and had no in­for­ma­tion sug­gest­ing teach­ers were par­tic­i­pat­ing in a “day of rest and re­flec­tion.”

“I don’t know of any sick­out. TTUTA is not part of any day of rest and re­flec­tion. We heard some in­for­ma­tion just as you did, but we don’t have any in­for­ma­tion with re­spect to that. To tell you the truth, I did not in­struct any­body to take a day of rest at any point in time,” Ashe said.

Mean­while, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Michael Dowlath al­so said he was un­aware of any co­or­di­nat­ed ac­tion by teach­ers.

He said the ad­min­is­tra­tion of Na­tion­al Tests meant on­ly Stan­dard One and Stan­dard Three pupils were ex­pect­ed to at­tend class­es.

He not­ed that in sev­er­al schools across both north and south Trinidad, stu­dents from oth­er year groups were not re­quired to be present be­cause of the test­ing ex­er­cise, con­tribut­ing sig­nif­i­cant­ly to the re­duced num­bers ob­served on school com­pounds.

Teach­ers have been frus­trat­ed over the Gov­ern­ment’s an­nounce­ment that out­stand­ing back­pay oblig­a­tions will be set­tled over sev­er­al years, with some pay­ments ex­tend­ing in­to 2027. TTUTA has been vo­cal in its crit­i­cism of the arrange­ment, ar­gu­ing that teach­ers have wait­ed years for monies owed to them and ex­press­ing con­cern about changes to time­lines pre­vi­ous­ly dis­cussed. The union has al­so raised is­sues af­fect­ing re­tirees, staffing short­ages, teacher wel­fare and in­creas­ing work­place pres­sures with­in the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem.