In our Sunday edition last week we carried a report on the appointment of former Region 3 Chairman Esau Dookie as headmaster of Saraswat Primary School. The issue which was raised in that report, as well as in a subsequent letter from Mr George Cave published in Stabroek News the following day, related to the eligibility of Mr Dookie for the school in question. Mr Cave, the Guyana Teachers Union (GTU) representative on the Teaching Service Commission (TSC), said in his letter that the case raised constitutional questions, and that the courts of Guyana might have to be asked to pronounce on whether the commission had the right “to reject and/or ignore the policy position of the Government of Guyana – conveyed to it in writing – and proceed to do its own thing.”
As in the case of similar bodies all over the world, it was not intended that the TSC should make teaching appointments or give promotions on whim; it was supposed to operate according to rules which, among other things, laid down the criteria which applicants should meet before they could be considered for a given post. In fact the policy framework and rules by which the commission was operating until recently, had emerged from a long series of meetings between the Ministry of Education and the GTU in 2001, when the late Mr Bertram Hamilton was the President of the union. After agreement had been reached between the two parties, a substantial document had been forwarded to the TSC setting forth the Government of Guyana’s policy position which was to be implemented by the commission, and making recommendations in terms of the procedures that body could adopt.
The new rules actually went into operation that same year, but in August 2001, the life of all the constitutional commissions, including the TSC, came to an end. Thereafter followed a long hiatus because of the dispute between the two major political parties over the Police Service Commission, which stalled the appointment of most of the other commissions as well, and it was not until that matter was settled that a new TSC could be sworn in. This was finally done on January 20, 2004, whereafter the policy established in 2001 continued in operation until 2005, when a hitch arose. This was the consequence of a misunderstanding between the Chief Education Officer and the GTU concerning an aspect of the rules, but it was ironed out, resulting in an amendment whose application was extended in 2006.
The schools of Guyana are graded for the purposes of making appointments, and in the case of the primary schools these run from A (the highest grade) through to E (the lowest). Prior to becoming a Regional Chairman, Mr Dookie had been for some years the non-graduate headmaster of Western Hog Island Primary School – a Grade E school. As we reported last week, he wrote in October 2006 to the TSC indicating that his term of office as Chairman of Region 3 would come to an end on the 31st of that month, and requesting that he be appointed headmaster of a Grade A school, or if no such post were available, then of a Grade B school.
There are certain complexities surrounding Mr Dookie’s secondment to the regional post, and leaving those completely aside, the central matter is whether the newly appointed headmaster of Saraswat Primary School meets the TSC’s eligibility requirements under the rules. According to a vacancy notice from the commission published in this newspaper last year, applicants for heads of Grade B primary schools must be either the heads of Grade C and Grade D primary schools, or the deputy heads of Grade A and Grade B primary schools. As a former headmaster of a Grade E school, Mr Dookie prima facie does not, therefore, meet the criteria. He himself claimed in his letter to the TSC that at the time he became Regional Chairman he was due for promotion to at least a grade D school, and had he been given the opportunity he was confident he would have been promoted to a Grade A school. Even if one were to assume for the sake of argument that that would have been the case, it still would not seem to make him eligible under the rules.
In his letter to this newspaper Mr Cave raised other issues relating to Mr Dookie’s modus operandi for seeking a promotion, namely, that senior vacant posts are advertised at the request of the Ministry of Education, and the minimum eligibility requirements stated; secondly that “interested, eligible teachers need to apply and compete for the post with their peers who are similarly eligible.” Thirdly, it is made clear that teachers should apply “only for those advertised vacant posts which they intend to take up, if offered, and in which they intend to remain
