FOLLOWING an intense stint of investigations, the Guyana Fire Service has finally found the cause of the huge fire that ravaged the main building of the North Ruimveldt Multilateral School last week.

Acting Fire Chief, Kalamadeen Edoo, in an invited comment told the Sunday Chronicle that the fire started in one of the classrooms on the third floor of the building, just above the school’s Home Economics Laboratory. He said investigators discovered that the fire started from a faulty duplex electrical point that had a circuit strip (power strip) attached to it.

The Fire Chief could not say who left the power strip plugged in, or how long it was plugged in for before the fire started.

The fire devastated the school’s First to Fifth-Form classrooms, Science, Home-Economics and Information Technology laboratories, as well as the $3 million ‘smart’ classroom, the first to be launched in Guyana in 2015.

Meanwhile, with the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations slated to commence tomorrow, Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand on Friday disclosed that despite the devastating fire, the students will be able to write the exams in the school’s auditorium.

This decision by the ministry came after consultation with parents and students of the school who requested that the examination be done in the auditorium. The request was based on a dire need to have to the students housed in one location, and not have them separated during any of their exams. Having the exam at the school would also allow the students to be in a familiar environment.

At the meeting, parents had expressed concern over the students being placed at other schools, which they noted could potentially cause anxiety and discomfort.
Sixty-Five students from the school are scheduled to take the 2021 examinations.

The Education Minister said that the ministry did all that it could have done to get the school in a state of readiness to accommodate the students. She said that the work that was done by everyone to get the school ready shows how much can be done when people work together.

The ministry disclosed that while the majority of the subjects will be written at the school, those students writing Electronic Document Processing and Management (EDPM) will do so at the Government Technical Institute (GTI), and that transportation will be provided for them.

Minister Manickchand also indicated that the government has made arrangements on for lunch to be provided each day of the examinations, so as to ensure that the students of the school are adequately catered for.

The education minister encouraged the students to put their best foot forward, saying, “The ball is now in your court; today, we hand the baton to you to take it from here. We’ve done everything we could possibly do to keep you in a frame of mind that will allow you to just soar. So, go ahead and soar.”