The Stan­dard Five teacher ac­cused of ver­bal­ly de­grad­ing and abus­ing stu­dents of the Tran­quil­li­ty Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School has been re­moved from the class­room and will be pre­sent­ed with a cease to re­port for du­ty let­ter by the end of this week.

This was con­firmed by Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia fol­low­ing a meet­ing at the school this morn­ing.

Gar­cia made the im­promp­tu de­ci­sion to meet with the school’s ad­min­is­tra­tion af­ter sev­er­al voice record­ings of the teacher were made by stu­dents and shared with their par­ents as to the lev­el of abuse be­ing met­ed out by the teacher.

Ac­com­pa­nied by the Chief Ed­u­ca­tion Of­fi­cer Har­ri­lal Seecha­ran, Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary Lenore Bap­tiste-Sim­mons, Ad­vi­sor Cheryl Ann Wilkin­son and oth­er of­fi­cials - Gar­cia ad­mit­ted they were “very dis­turbed and very con­cerned” af­ter learn­ing of the is­sues af­fect­ing the school.

Gar­cia claimed there was a gen­er­al lethar­gy re­gard­ing some mem­bers of staff who, “Don’t seem to be able to con­form to the reg­u­lar stan­dards of good per­for­mance.”

He said is­sues of late com­ing, ab­sences, and the ad­min­is­ter­ing of cor­po­ral pun­ish­ment to stu­dents were chief among the prob­lems now be­ing re­port­ed as it re­lat­ed to staff per­for­mance.

Gar­cia said it was clear that school of­fi­cials were not ad­her­ing to the school-based man­age­ment sys­tem that had been put in place for such is­sues to be re­port­ed.

Re­veal­ing that five coun­selors from the Stu­dent Sup­port Ser­vices Di­vi­sion had been as­signed to the school and par­tic­u­lar­ly to as­sist the af­fect­ed stu­dents dur­ing this trou­bling time, Gar­cia said the teacher’s fate now lay in the hands of the Teach­ing Ser­vice Com­mis­sion who would have to pro­nounce on what the out­come would be.

Seecha­ran con­firmed the min­istry had a cell­phone pol­i­cy in place for all schools, and this lat­est in­ci­dent on­ly re­in­forced the fact that it was not be­ing ad­hered to.