Two weeks ago, the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies (UWI) Guild of Stu­dents threat­ened to protest if GATE of­fi­cials did not pull up their socks and have the out­stand­ing ap­pli­ca­tions processed on time for stu­dents to be able to re­sume class­es in the new se­mes­ter. How­ev­er, three weeks in­to the se­mes­ter many stu­dents still have not been giv­en the re­quired clear­ances from the uni­ver­si­ty due to holds on their ac­counts aris­ing from pend­ing GATE ap­pli­ca­tion ap­provals.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, act­ing pres­i­dent of the Guild Teshan­na Mo­hammed in­di­cat­ed that the coun­cil would de­cide on the next step when reg­is­tra­tion ends lat­er this week.

“Protest is al­ways our last re­sort and Feb­ru­ary 7 is about a week away. We would like to give GATE of­fice the ben­e­fit of the doubt to en­sure that ap­pli­ca­tions are processed.”

How­ev­er, she did not rule out the op­tion.

“We as a Guild would al­ways stand with our stu­dents and we’ll take what­ev­er nec­es­sary ac­tion is need­ed,” she said.

While she said there were still in­stances of out­stand­ing ap­pli­ca­tions, she in­di­cat­ed that she was not in the po­si­tion to give an ex­act fig­ure of the stu­dents af­fect­ed.

On Jan­u­ary 15, Guild pres­i­dent Justin Subero de­scribed the sit­u­a­tion as “chaot­ic and mass con­fu­sion” to Guardian Me­dia. He al­so said stu­dents have been in a state of “pan­ic and wor­ry” be­cause they are un­able to reg­is­ter for their cours­es. Many of them are fi­nal year stu­dents.

He al­so said if the is­sue wasn’t rec­ti­fied by Jan­u­ary 20 when class­es re­sumed, they would take protest ac­tion.

How­ev­er, the Head of the Fund­ing and Grants Ad­min­is­tra­tion Di­vi­sion, which is charged with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the man­age­ment of the Gov­ern­ment As­sis­tance for Tu­ition Ex­pens­es Pro­gramme (GATE) un­der the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion sub­se­quent­ly the Guild and UWI, said that it is work­ing to com­plete out­stand­ing ap­pli­ca­tions from stu­dents.

In a re­lease, the min­istry ex­plained the de­lays in the pro­cess­ing of GATE ap­pli­ca­tion were as a re­sult of the pro­vi­sion of stale-dat­ed fi­nan­cial in­for­ma­tion, omis­sions in house­hold in­come and sub­mis­sion of in­cor­rect doc­u­ments as proof of in­come and staff con­straints.