On Tuesday a 7NEWS investigation (SeeWhy there is still no internet in Belize's classrooms) revealed that when Intelco closed its doors in September, they shut off internet access to thousands of students. The students affected attend one of the 57 schools which were part of government's school wide area network or "SWAN." The program falls under the Ministry of Education which now has to find a way to get these schools back online. Today the Ministry's point man on information technology Mustafa Toure met with school principals from the Belize district to discuss the issue and after, he told us internet will return to the classroom but it won't be free.
Mustafa Toure, Ministry of Education
"We went over some options that the Ministry is looking at to provide internet for schools without Intelco or BTL being involved for that matter. So we just outlined to them some of the options that we would like to pursue and got more or less a consensus from them that they wouldn't mind us attempting to put together some kind of arrangement whereby the schools collectively would try to get internet as opposed to individually."
KS: Will internet return to the classroom?
Mustafa Toure,
"Oh definitely. In fact internet is already there. Its just that because Intelco has cut off a certain switch, they can no longer get the internet. Its already out in the air so in that sense the internet will hopefully be back in the Belize City schools, the ones that were set up to receive, we hope as early as January."
KS: _Will it be free?
Mustafa Toure,
"Well it wasn't free before to be honest. What happened is that Intelco provided the service free but at the same time government also had further arrangements that allowed them to do that. They no longer have the other arrangements that allow them to do that so we don't expect that in the future it will be free."
As we noted in our original story, some schools such as St. Martin's Deporres and St. Joseph Primary used their own resources to get back online.