Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les 

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent 

The Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) says teach­ers across To­ba­go are grow­ing in­creas­ing­ly frus­trat­ed, as salary de­lays and stalled school re­pairs con­tin­ue to cloud the start of the new aca­d­e­m­ic term, mere days be­fore stu­dents re­turn to class.

TTUTA To­ba­go of­fi­cer Bradon Roberts yes­ter­day said some teach­ers on­ly be­gan re­ceiv­ing their Au­gust salaries yes­ter­day, but many oth­ers re­main un­paid. He de­scribed the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly’s (THA) Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion’s han­dling of the sit­u­a­tion as “ex­treme­ly dis­ap­point­ing,” point­ing to poor com­mu­ni­ca­tion with those af­fect­ed.

Roberts ex­plained that TTUTA has been try­ing to get clar­i­ty since last week, but the di­vi­sion on­ly con­firmed yes­ter­day morn­ing that an IT serv­er prob­lem was re­spon­si­ble for the de­lays. He said salary re­leas­es were sent to the bank on Fri­day, with pay­ments now trick­ling in.

“Quite a few teach­ers are yet to re­ceive their salaries,” Roberts said.

“These teach­ers are just not aware as to how long their wait is, what is the re­al is­sue. Teach­ers who may be liv­ing month to month would have had to go through that long week­end not know­ing when to ex­pect to get paid, and that is not good op­er­a­tion from an em­ploy­er.”

Roberts said the lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is un­ac­cept­able, since the di­vi­sion has a des­ig­nat­ed FAC ac­count to send up­dates di­rect­ly to teach­ers. In­stead, he said TTUTA has been left to do the leg­work to find out why teach­ers were un­paid.

Be­yond salaries, Roberts al­so raised alarm about school in­fra­struc­ture. TTUTA cir­cu­lat­ed a da­ta tool to gath­er feed­back on the state of school re­pairs and re­ceived 21 re­spons­es. Of those, 12 schools in­di­cat­ed that no re­pairs were car­ried out ahead of re­open­ing. He said some of the in­sti­tu­tions flagged, such as St Patrick’s Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry, have se­ri­ous elec­tri­cal prob­lems.

“At this stage, for noth­ing to be done, I’m not cer­tain what the di­vi­sion is re­al­ly work­ing on,” Roberts said.

He linked the stalled progress to con­stant changes in lead­er­ship, ex­plain­ing that To­ba­go has seen five ad­min­is­tra­tors in the di­vi­sion since he be­came TTUTA’s rep­re­sen­ta­tive.

“The con­stant change takes time for new per­sons to get in tune with what is hap­pen­ing, and the pro­gres­sive move­ment that we are all de­sirous of is be­ing hin­dered,” Roberts said.

“Our ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem can­not suf­fer any longer with these bu­reau­cra­cies and tech­ni­cal is­sues at that lead­er­ship lev­el.”

Roberts is now call­ing on the THA to ur­gent­ly ad­dress the prob­lems so teach­ers can be paid on time and schools can op­er­ate safe­ly.

Mes­sages sent by Guardian Me­dia to Ed­u­ca­tion Sec­re­tary Zor­isha Hack­ett for com­ment went unan­swered.