Earlier this week, we told you about how the student population of Trio Village had to miss classes. That's because the main road in this community, located in Northern Toledo, was impassable.
Portions of that main road had fallen into a significant state of disrepair, so the teachers of Trio Government School couldn't commute to classes to teach their lessons to students, and high school scholars couldn't travel to Independence Village. Naturally, whenever students miss classes in this manner, it's a crisis for the Ministry of Education, and a team from the Ministry of Infrastructure Development and Housing was quickly dispatched to address the broken road.
Chief Engineer Lennox Bradley told us on Tuesday that Trio's neighbor, the community of San Pablo, was facing a similar predicament and that they would have to address their damaged road also. Well, reports started emerging from San Pablo yesterday that the students from that community couldn't attend school because their road was too damaged to allow transportation. We received follow-up reports today that the road problems forced the closure of the San Pablo school once again.
So, when we caught up with the Education Minister this morning, we asked him about the distress of these village scholars who couldn't attend all the school days this week. Here's what he had to say:
Daniel Ortiz
"Your portfolio as Minister of Education - the people of San Pablo..."
Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education
"It's an urgent matter and of course whenever our students and teachers don't have access to school, for us that is a crisis and so we are well aware of the issue. We have been working on it for the past four or five days in Trio, that is almost resolved. I understand that the Trio issue will be fully resolved today and the road will be fully passable. And, tomorrow the Ministry of Infrastructure Development tells me that they will go into San Pablo to address that issue. Fortunately, we have a long weekend, so the kids don't return to school until Tuesday. So, we are absolutely confident that between now and Monday we will resolve that issue in San Pablo as well."
"Unfortunately, these are the challenges we face in rural communities especially when we have persistent rain and we have been having persistent rain in the Toledo District for the past few weeks. So, MIDH has not been able to do the work as quickly as they would like to and address the issues. But, they are there. The equipment is there. They have been working everyday as much as possible. So, we are confident that they will address it. This is what happens in rural communities when you have years of neglect. We are trying to reverse those years of neglect through rural development, infrastructure, all of us working together. But, for us at the Ministry of Education our number one priority is ensuring that our kids and teachers get to school, have access to school, so we are committed to that and we will be on top of it for the entire weekend."
