Plans to tran­si­tion Bish­op Anstey East, Trin­i­ty Col­lege East and BATCE Sixth Form to a gov­ern­ment-as­sist­ed mod­el are now at a stand­still.

This, as Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly said “no firm de­ci­sion” had been made when it comes to the fu­ture of the schools.

Over the past few months, teach­ers com­plained about no longer hav­ing job se­cu­ri­ty, fol­low­ing the end of a 20-year con­tract be­tween the Bish­op Anstey As­so­ci­a­tion (BAA) and the State, which led to Gov­ern­ment hav­ing com­plete own­er­ship of the schools’ build­ing and land in Trinci­ty.

Hav­ing agreed to a tran­si­tion, once com­plet­ed, it would al­so mean the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion (TSC) will have com­plete con­trol of the hir­ing and fir­ing of teach­ers, their biggest con­cern.

In a let­ter dat­ed Au­gust 7, the BAA told its staff that af­ter meet­ing Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry of­fi­cials on Ju­ly 24, “It was com­mu­ni­cat­ed that the in­ten­tion of the gov­ern­ment of Trinidad and To­ba­go is to con­tin­ue to sup­port the ex­ist­ing school-based man­age­ment mod­el. Fund­ing arrange­ments have been put in place for the op­er­a­tions of the schools. Our schools will re­open as sched­uled on Sep­tem­ber 2, 2024, God Will­ing.”

When Guardian Me­dia reached out to the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter yes­ter­day, she said, “No firm de­ci­sion has been yet made. The school con­tin­ues to op­er­ate in the same way.”

How­ev­er, while it ap­pears things will be back to nor­mal on Sep­tem­ber 2, sev­er­al teach­ers said there are still many ques­tions left unan­swered.

One BATCE Sixth-Form teacher said, “We still feel as if we have no more cer­tain­ty than we did a cou­ple months ago. The let­ter came across very vague... As it is right now, we don’t know if that is for now.”

One Bish­op Anstey East teacher said, “We have no idea. I think they think that we would feel bet­ter about it but it’s so vague, peo­ple don’t know what to think. We don’t know any­thing, and it doesn’t solve any of the is­sues that we have ei­ther.”

Ef­forts to con­tact BAA head Bish­op of the An­gli­can Dio­cese, Rev’d Bish­op Claude Berkley, were fu­tile yes­ter­day evening.