– North R/Veldt by September, North West Secondary by year end

THE long-awaited St Rose’s High School in Georgetown is set to be completed by June, while re-construction of the North Ruimveldt Secondary school is scheduled to be completed by September, and work on the re-construction of the North West Secondary could be completed by the end of the year.

The Yarrowkabra Secondary is also slated to be completed in May, 2023, while the extensions on the St Winifred Secondary, and East Ruimveldt Secondary are also expected to be completed by June.

These timelines were shared by Minister of Education, Priya Manickchand, on Tuesday last, as she faced questions before the Committee of Supply during the examination of the Budget Estimates.

As she faced questions from Opposition member, Natasha Singh-Lewis about an allocation of $5.5 billion in the 2023 Budget for the construction of schools, Minister Manickchand reminded that the PPP/C government is left to complete a number of schools that the APNU+AFC left incomplete during their tenure.

“St Rose’s, you would recall, was demolished sometime around 2018 and never got rebuilt. We began to rebuild that and that’s going to be completed in June of this year. North Ruimveldt Multilateral was destroyed by fire in 2021. We began to rebuild that last year; it’s going to be completed this year by September. The North West Secondary school was destroyed by arson in 2021. We began to rebuild that and it’s going to be completed in 12 months, so that’s sometime at the end of this year,” Minister Manickchand explained.

The south block of the St Rose’s High on Church Street, South Cummingsburg was completely demolished in July 2018, after it was determined that the structure had reached a state of disrepair, and all other options were exhausted.

Though a $352.7 million contract for the construction of a new building had been signed by the former Coalition government with Courtney Benn Contracting Services Limited in August 2018, the construction was plagued with delays, contract extensions, and increased contract price.

When the PPP/C took office in August 2020, that contract was terminated in November 2020, with the company having completed only nine per cent of the scheduled work.

A $515 million contract to complete the school was then awarded to Shandong Degian International in September 2021. The project also has a consultancy firm, Kalitech Inc, which is supervising the quality and pace of ongoing works.

Construction on the North Ruimveldt and North West Secondary schools commenced last year, after the two were both destroyed by fire, in separate incidents.

Minister Manickchand also noted that the St George’s and Christ Church Secondary, which were also destroyed in respective fires, would also be rebuilt.