La Fillette students forgotten as $17.5Mschool building project abandoned

Joshua Seemungal

Senior Multimedia Journalist

joshua.seemungal@guardian.co.tt

Before flashing camera lights, suited officials, and smiling uniformed children, former education minister Dr Tim Gopeesingh promised on July 20, 2015, that in eight months, pupils and staff of La Fillette Roman Catholic Primary School would be moving into a new building.

According to Dr Gopeesingh, shortly after turning the sod, the project would cost $17.5 million and be completed in March 2016. The project, under the controversial, defunct Education Facilities Company Limited (EFCL), was listed as 22 per cent complete under the 2016 State Enterprises Investment Programme (SEIP).

Yet, eight years later, and despite at least $204,000 being spent on construction and repair costs on the school by the State, not a single brick has been laid for the new facility.

The dilapidated building remains abandoned, while pupils of the primary school occupy a hall at the Blanchisseuse Secondary School. Residents said what they hoped was a temporary solution has become a permanent one.

When Guardian Media visited the old school compound, a resident in her late 40s lamented the state of the building.

“I think this building has been closed for about eight years. They were supposed to build a new school. They ended up condemning this school since the principal decided it was better to move up in the high school. It’s not comfortable for the children in the hall, and when rain falls, they could get wet,” she said.

“It’s a shame to see what it has become. There was a construction sign there, but nothing ever came out of the project.”

The tattered and sun-bleached construction sign was still there. Its condition matched the state of the abandoned building. The signs say, “Start Date: March 25th, 2014” and “Education Facilities Company Limited—Working for You.”

On the immediate left of the school’s entrance is a sky-blue Catholic chapel. It’s simple and quaint, like most old Catholic chapels. Despite the mostly boarded windows, the 10 am sun illuminated the building’s interior through the white, circular concrete venting holes—one shaped like a cross. To the front of the chapel was a wooden altar.

The exterior of the condemned prefab classrooms was stained with violent rust. Their interior was relatively decent. The floor’s white tiles were still intact, while a few plastic chairs and fans remained. The whiteboards had three lines of lessons. The second set of prefab classrooms at the bottom of a short flight of stairs were in even worse condition than the first.

The short hallway, where children once ran, was full of stagnant water and deep green moss—a potential mosquito haven. The surrounding brush, where the sod was turned nine years ago, was wild and overgrown.

Bright blue galvanised sheets, the first pieces of material for the new school brought a decade ago, were covered in vines.

On the school tank was the first sign of the school logo, hand-painted many years ago in white. “La Fillette RC School—The Will Does It. Established 1954.”

The walkway to the adjacent restroom and library was covered in old sewer runoff from the leaking underground septic tank. The toilet seats and bathroom tiles were covered in faeces. Five or six bats flew from bathroom stall to stall, avoiding the sunlight from the opened doors.

A large white metallic fence blocked the entrance to Blanchisseuse Secondary School, but one could see primary school students in the distance through the gate’s narrow rectangular holes.

Families being asked to contribute to school

As residents said, the primary school pupils occupied a small portion of the secondary school.

The shouts of a few primary school pupils offered a noticeable contrast to the dead silence of the secondary school students a short distance away.

Husband and wife, Christopher and Seema Mungal, live in a wooden shack on private property located next to the school. They have permission to occupy the land.

Christopher, his wife, and their five children are allowed to live in the small house at the bottom of the property’s hilly driveway in exchange for him working as a caretaker of the main house and the property.

Seema sells produce seconds away, near the La Fillette bridge. Three of the children—nine, ten and 13 years old—attend the La Fillette RC Primary School, while their other two children—15 and 16 years old—attend the secondary school. Their walk to school, always accompanied by their father, takes no more than five minutes.

Last week, Christopher said, there were four violent incidents at the primary/secondary school—two stabbings and two fights that he saw. “There were two stabbings last week alone. On Monday, there was a stabbing between a girl and a boy, and on Wednesday, there was a stabbing with two girls. These children are around 13 to 16.

“The facilities in the school are really rundown. They don’t paint or do any maintenance. If the river comes down here, the water is dirty in the school. There is no backup water tank for those children to finish out the school day. They call parents now to come and pick up the children because the water is dirty. They have to cut their education instead of finishing what they are doing, and they have to come back the next day to finish what they are doing,” he complained. According to Christopher and his wife, they were recently asked to contribute $600 to the school. $600, for the family who is only guaranteed $145 a day income, is a lot.

“They said $200 for a gallon of paint, $100 for an ID badge for them to come in, which is well and fine, $100 to apply for the ID, and another $100. I didn’t pay for it, but I did send $200 for the gallon of paint. I told them if they needed help to paint it, as I bought the gallon of paint, I’d do that and do it for free.

“They do a lot of raising funds in that school, but you don’t really see much from the money at all,” he said.

Christopher said he tried several times in vain to offer his services to the school as a maintenance man.

Seema expressed concern about the school fence, saying people could easily enter the compound through the many holes.

“It’s the same compound. Primary school students cannot go on the secondary school side, and secondary school students cannot go on the primary school side.

“They really wanted parents to put out a certain amount of money to help with the PTA meeting, so parents could buy paint and do free painting. The Government doesn’t help that school,” she said. After leaving the compound, Abraham, a resident in his late teens who attended primary school, complained that job opportunities in the community are hard.

“It had CEPEP, but you know not everybody could do that. There’s only football (semi-pro), you could say, and you have to go out there and play football.

“Now, it might take a little hour or half hour to get a maxi into town, depending on the day. But you can’t get transport from town from 5:30 onwards,” he said. As he finished speaking, the mother of a secondary school student complained about teacher absenteeism at the neighbouring school.

“There’s a Form 5 teacher in there; the whole of last term they didn’t see her, and the whole of this term, she hasn’t reported to work either. And they know CXC coming. The whole first two days of school, no bus pass; the children had to be basically hiking to school,” she said.

In 2016, La Fillette residents protested for a new school and were assured they would receive one.

$3.3B to repair or construct schools between 2016 and 2023

Over eight years, between fiscal years 2016 and 2023, at least $3.3 billion was allocated by the Government to projects to repair or construct primary and secondary schools, according to Guardian Media’s research.

There are 453 primary schools and 125 secondary schools in the education system. On average, that means each school has received refurbishment and construction funding of $5.7 million.

The incoming PNM Government in 2015 accused the People’s Partnership coalition of leaving dozens of unfinished schools behind.

Finance Minister Imbert said that 118 school projects were not completed. Imbert said the Government had a $2.8 billion financial hole to complete the school repairs and construction.

In December 2017, former EFCL chairman Arnold Piggott told a JSC that he resigned because of a culture of corruption and mismanagement. He also alleged political interference. He said that during his 17 months in office, there were four irregularities in the issuance of contracts.

Several school projects, under the EFCL, that were supposed to provide new buildings are incomplete, abandoned, or never started. Among them are: Lower Morvant Government Primary School, Reform SDMS Primary School, Carapichaima West Government Secondary, and Parvati Girls’ Secondary School. Between fiscal 2016 and 2023, approximately $69.5 billion was allocated in the national budget to the education sector.

Education Minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly said the challenges schools in T&T face with repairs stem from a lack of sufficient funding, despite the substantial $5 billion allocated to the Ministry of Education in the last budget.

Gadsby-Dolly was defending the lack of readiness of some schools for the new academic year at the start of this month. The minister said the ministry was left with only $150 million for the School Repair Programme after the $5 billion allocation was divided into recurrent and other expenses.

“If we need to build schools, we have to secure loan funding, which isn’t accounted for in the standard budget. We have a lot of schools, and it takes a significant amount of money to keep them running, with much of the budget allocated to that,” she added.

Gadsby-Dolly does not see a resolution to the issue in the short term either.

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