Retired education specialist, Lindener Dr Walter Kyte believes that there are still opportunities within the education system to develop a long-term programme, with accountability being its main hallmark, and positively impact the lives of students and teachers.
Kyte, was born in Georgetown but had moved with his parents to Mackenzie (now named Linden) at the age of four.
He gained all his foundation education in Linden before migrating to the USA where he furthered his studies and was accredited as a leading educator in the USA. Last year when he met Minister of Education Shaik Baksh in the US, Kyte said that various opportunities are there to create changes in the education system but “there must be more accountability, you have to hold people accountable for performance.”
Kyte is a retired educator with 34 years of service with the New York City Board of Education. He served in various capacities such as reader, teacher, special education coordinator, coordinator of the Attendance Improvement and Dropout Prevention Programme, assistant principal and principal. In the summer of 2004, Kyte was selected to serve District 23 New York as its Superintendent and under his leadership it ranked among the top five districts in the city. In 2005 the district was ranked first in the city of New York in reading and tenth in math.
Today, he is back home in the town of his humble beginnings for the Town Week 2011 festivities. And, like hundreds of others who travelled to Guyana for the celebrations, Kyte vows to socialise with his peers, visit the communities where he played as a boy and visit some of the older folks still residing in the area. A key facilitator among the group of overseas-based Guyanese who have been instrumental in coordinating and executing a series of workshops throughout the week-long celebrations, Kyte said he was “honoured to have this opportunity of coming here to really share the little that I have with the educators and the communities.” One of the sessions has been designed and targeted at teachers, administrators and leaders within the education sector.
For the little time he has been back home during the past two years, Kyte observed that there needs to be more professional development training in specific areas within the education sector. He said an environment must be created where children would want to go to school and teachers would want to work, “where they feel they are wanted, that they are cared for and to develop a strong parental involvement. I know it’s not easy if I am to be realistic, but we have to begin somewhere.”
According to Kyte the kind of training that is currently being done for teachers needs much more expansion and though the government is doing the best it can, its best is not enough. He suggested that government needs to go after the expertise of persons who have to ‘know how’ to work extensively with educators. He said that during a visit to Guyana in 2010 he was afforded the opportunity to visit a few schools where he saw first-hand that there was a lack of leadership. “I have noticed that there is not a drive to move the agenda of certain schools… I think we all need to wake up and smell the roses… because if we miss out on what is essential for these kids it would come back to haunt us,” he added. He also said he was concerned about the early childhood programmes that currently exist.
Kyte said too that it was time that teachers stopped blaming children for not performing and start looking to see where they may be falling short in executing their duties. Also, though he commended the efforts by the Linden Fund to work with educators and other social groups during the Town Week celebrations, Kyte noted that enough was not being done to effectively impact the education system. “What we need is a more long- term programme where we can come three or four times a year to work with these professionals,” he said.
