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Nov 03, 2013 News
A Barbados newspaper’s report of a private school being forced to adjust its programming and outlook, or face closure following the departure of many Guyanese, points to the influence of persons from Guyana on the island.
Last Friday’s edition of the Nation newspaper reported Principal of the Windsor School of Business and Arts, Rodney Prescott, saying that he has been forced to change his approach to education delivery in order to keep his school viable.
He said that the Bank Hall, St Michael, school was for some years now suffering from a massive decline in the number of persons attending.
“He admitted that the school, which caters mainly to non-nationals, lost many students when the Guyanese population began to move out of Barbados in 2007,” the newspaper reported.
“We were faced with financial problems and low numbers,” Prescott said of the school which is managing to survive by adopting other methods to attract replacement for the Guyanese who supported it over the years.
The experience of this Barbados private school was reported just one day after the island’s Attorney General and Minister of Home Affairs, Adriel Brathwaite, claimed that his country is not ready for full regional integration because its educational system cannot take on the expected influx of students from other Caribbean territories.
Speaking last Thursday during a panel discussion, he pointed to the island’s education capacity and said Barbados is about three secondary schools short of where it wants to be, and that a similar situation applies to the junior schools.
“If we want to invite our brothers and sisters to come and live with us, we want to ensure that they also have education,” he said.
Brathwaite spoke of persons living illegally in his St Phillip South political constituency, with children not going to school. “It is not a desirable thing at all, because at the end of the day any deviancy that can arise we still have to deal with it.”
That panel discussion, at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, was about the Shanique Myrie judgment and its implication for Caribbean integration.
That judgment was that the October 4 ruling by the Caribbean Court of Justice that Barbados violated the rights of Myrie, a Jamaican national, by refusing her entry into the island two years ago. The CCJ further made clear in a binding decision that Barbados, along with the other 14 CARICOM member states, must grant to visitors from any of these countries an automatic entry for six months into the territory.
During the course of that trial it was revealed more Guyanese, than persons from any other CARICOM country, were turned back from the Barbados airport between 2007 to 2012.
Those returnees, counted at 2,128, do not include the forced exodus of Guyanese from the Barbados shores between 2008 and 2010.
Many of these are the Guyanese whose children attended that Windsor School of Business and Arts. The newspaper’s report of the school’s struggle to survive after the Guyanese departure stands in contrast to the statement by the Barbadian Attorney General, suggesting people from Guyana and other CARICOM countries will be a burden on the island’s education system.
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Where is the BETTER MANAGEMENT/RENEGOTIATION OF THE OIL CONTRACTS you promised Jagdeo?
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Barbados!! you are a small island. thus you have small mentality and small vision
How sweet it is to say that Guyanese and other CARICOM countries will be a burden to your island ‘s education. What you people think it is a tall, I guess you believe you are better than all the CARICOM countries. Guyanese men are REAL MEN….hahahaha that’s why the Bajan women love our Guyanese men…..