EDUCATION Minister, Dr Rupert Roopnaraine has commissioned an audit of Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) in schools countrywide in an effort to ensure solid parental participation in their children’s education. Following a series of large community meetings where parents expressed worry about their children’s schooling, the minister saw the need for a renewal of PTAs in schools. “I want to see throughout the systems where PTAs are working and where they are not working to fix them because we need the PTAs to be fully involved.
“The role of the PTA throughout the school systems needs to be energised, activated, and creative; we cannot undertake or believe that education for our children stops in the classroom,” said Dr. Roopnaraine. In an interview with the Guyana Chronicle, Dr Roopnaraine said parents abandon their children’s schooling once the students complete their Grade Six education. This, he said, forms part of the setback in the education system. It is this factor besides the education groundings that led to the call for an audit of PTAs in schools.
At the launch of Education Month, Dr. Roopnaraine plugged the importance of PTAs to the development of the education system, while calling on fathers to play a more meaningful role in the lives of their children. “We cannot…believe that the education of our children stops in the classroom; parents have more time with their children than teachers.
“Fathers have to play a more active role in the education of the children,” Dr Roopnaraine posited, after pointing out that the community meetings are mostly attended by mothers. The PTA audits will feed into the Commission of Inquiry (CoI) in the education sector, once the inquiry gets going.
The setting up of the Commission of Inquiry has been agreed to in order to determine the state of the current education system. The CoI will recommend measures that could be implemented to improve the sector countrywide.
The CoI into education will involve teachers, education officials, and citizens from across the country and experts in various fields. Audit teams were sent to schools in every region to assess their current situation and gain information on issues that plague them. The teams have also been tasked with conducting environmental audits of the schools. The audits have revealed that the system is in a bad shape due to “outmoded” methods that belong to a previous era. In mending this, the new administration has begun to equip schools and teachers with new technologies for Guyana to see an actual revolution in terms of education delivery.