Jesse Ramdeo

Se­nior Re­porter

jesse.ramdeo@cnc3.co.tt

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly says the au­thor­i­ties were not pre­pared to throw cau­tion to the wind in en­sur­ing the safe­ty of pupils dur­ing Thurs­day’s Sec­ondary En­trance As­sess­ment ex­am­i­na­tion.

Be­fore the ex­am be­gan, there were nu­mer­ous safe­ty checks, in­clud­ing in­spec­tions for ex­plo­sive de­vices, were con­duct­ed at sev­er­al schools which served as ex­am­i­na­tion cen­tres.

There were al­so ad­just­ments to the school sched­ule in the days lead­ing up to the ex­am­i­na­tion to fa­cil­i­tate the ex­er­cis­es, with pri­ma­ry schools be­ing asked to close a full day ahead of the SEA ex­am. Some prin­ci­pals al­so dis­missed class­es at mid­day on Tues­day to fa­cil­i­tate the checks.

Dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia out­side the Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day, the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter not­ed that pre­vi­ous bomb threats prompt­ed au­thor­i­ties to un­der­take the nec­es­sary in­spec­tions.

“We’ve had quite a num­ber of bomb threats over the past year, none of them have turned out to be true. Of course, they are very dis­rup­tive and so we did not want to take a chance with our SEA stu­dents, so we im­ple­ment­ed to the best of our abil­i­ty, with the as­sis­tance of the TTPS what we could have at our schools. And I want to thank our teach­ers and prin­ci­pals for their cor­po­ra­tion and we’re hap­py we had no in­ci­dents,” said Gads­by-Dol­ly.

Ear­li­er this month, bomb threats forced hun­dreds of teach­ers, pupils and staff in the south­east­ern dis­trict out of their class­rooms. The bomb threats were is­sued via the min­istry’s email ad­dress to some 49 schools.

In April 2023, bomb threats were made to over 100 schools across the coun­try, forc­ing the evac­u­a­tion of class­rooms and the ear­ly clo­sure of schools.

The threats were lat­er deemed to be all a hoax.

Mean­while, Gads­by-Dol­ly re­peat­ed com­men­da­tions to all stake­hold­ers who con­tributed to the smooth ex­e­cu­tion of the SEA ex­am­i­na­tion.

“We are very hap­py when we have an in­ci­dent free SEA. This year we took ad­di­tion­al mea­sures to stop the pa­pers, re­mem­ber we had the SEA pa­pers last year be­ing shown even though it was af­ter the ex­am­i­na­tion had start­ed, this year we took ad­di­tion­al mea­sures and we are glad we had none of that aris­ing,” the min­is­ter said.