Yes­ter­day’s de­ci­sion by the Trinidad and To­ba­go Uni­fied Teach­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) and Na­tion­al Pri­ma­ry Schools Prin­ci­pals’ As­so­ci­a­tion (NAPSPA) to boy­cott a meet­ing with Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly on the re­open­ing of schools, has the po­ten­tial to de­rail the min­istry’s plan to re­sume phys­i­cal class­es come Sep­tem­ber 6 when the new aca­d­e­m­ic year be­gins.

Dur­ing a vir­tu­al me­dia con­fer­ence, both TTUTA pres­i­dent An­to­nia Tekah De­fre­itas and NAPSPA boss Car­lene Hayes cit­ed the dis­re­spect shown by the min­istry ahead of the meet­ing as the rea­son for their boy­cott. More im­por­tant­ly, both cit­ed the fact that a draft pro­pos­al on the re­open­ing, a 51-page doc­u­ment, was on­ly pre­sent­ed to them last Fri­day. Fur­ther­more, they claimed not to have been con­sult­ed ahead of the doc­u­ment’s prepa­ra­tion.

The angst of these two main stake­hold­ers in the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem is un­der­stand­able. How­ev­er, giv­en the cli­mate in which so­ci­ety has been forced to op­er­ate due to COVID-19, would it al­so not have been wis­er for the two of­fi­cials to still have at­tend­ed the meet­ing, even if on­ly to in­di­cate their is­sues and call for an­oth­er ses­sion in­stead of a pub­lic dress down in the first in­stance? Luck­i­ly, oth­er stake­hold­ers at­tend­ed the meet­ing to of­fer their con­tri­bu­tions to the process.

Few cit­i­zens can counter the ar­gu­ment that the lack of phys­i­cal class time has se­ri­ous­ly re­tard­ed most chil­dren’s abil­i­ty to learn holis­ti­cal­ly. That lack of face-to-face in­ter­ac­tion with not on­ly teach­ers but class­mates has sig­nif­i­cant­ly con­tributed to this de­vel­op­ing woe. Ed­u­ca­tion ex­perts and stake­hold­ers are sug­gest­ing that so­ci­ety will not see the reper­cus­sions of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion un­til five to 10 years from now and that it will not be pos­i­tive ei­ther.

It is clear that TTUTA and NAPSPA have is­sues with the ex­ist­ing doc­u­ment and want to meet the Min­is­ter at the ta­ble. Hav­ing said that, it is high­ly un­like­ly that what­ev­er plan the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion comes up with for what will be a per­pet­u­al hy­brid learn­ing sys­tem, will be sat­is­fac­to­ry to all its stake­hold­ers — nor do we ex­pect it to.

How­ev­er, Min­is­ter Gads­by-Dol­ly needs to en­sure that she opens up the process to as much di­a­logue as pos­si­ble from all of the key stake­hold­ers. There is time in which to do it as well, giv­en that the school is now out on va­ca­tion.

Al­so, with the sched­uled ar­rival of an­oth­er batch of 800,000 Sinopharm vac­cines to­day, the promise of more lat­er this month and a more ag­gres­sive vac­ci­na­tion dri­ve by the Gov­ern­ment, T&T should be clos­er to achiev­ing the herd im­mu­ni­ty by Sep­tem­ber if all goes as planned by the Min­istry of Health.

It is like­ly then, that the ed­u­ca­tion stake­hold­ers may be a lit­tle more amenable to some rec­om­men­da­tions once they are sat­is­fied the in­fra­struc­ture is al­so in place to achieve cer­tain health and safe­ty man­dates. But even then, the onus will still be on the pop­u­la­tion to ex­hib­it the dis­ci­pline re­quired to fol­low the health pro­to­cols to keep COVID-19 away.

Ul­ti­mate­ly, how­ev­er, all ed­u­ca­tion stake­hold­ers must be at the ta­ble to un­der­take a ma­ture ap­proach to the process, or else we will not be able to achieve the in­tend­ed goal of en­sur­ing no child is left be­hind.