Last Wednesday’s fire that destroyed the St. George’s High School and more particularly, up until now, the absence of an official pronouncement on the likely cause, would have done little to alter public concerns about the spate of fires which, in recent years, have destroyed quite a few important public buildings.
Not least of these conflagrations, of course, would have been last October’s mind-numbing levelling of one of the capital’s iconic edifices, the complex housing the Brickdam Police Station. No less disconcerting than the inferno itself were some aspects of the government’s mind-numbing response to the occurrence, not least its seeming embracing of what bore an identical resemblance to a quixotic tale about the origins of the fire and its seeming refusal (even up to this time) to vigorously explore other investigatory avenues.
In the matter of last October’s North Ruimveldt Secondary School inferno that triggered one of the now familiar exercises designed to redistribute the affected children across other schools, it is worth wondering about the impact of the hasty and compulsory absorbing of significant numbers of suddenly displaced children into ‘new’ schools on the education delivery regime, as much for the host schools as for the newly reassigned children. More than that, the fact that the tenders for the rebuilding of the North Georgetown Secondary were finally opened more than a year after the building was destroyed raises questions – which are deserving of answers – as to the reason why it could not have been tackled with a much greater level of alacrity.
Where the destruction of public buildings is concerned – state-run schools and Police Stations have, in recent times, been bearing the brunt of this malady though, mind-bogglingly, the various incidents do not appear to have been attended by anywhere near a particularly high level of official anxiety to effect immediate and diligent probes and afterwards to place the findings thereof in the public domain.
This brings us, in a general way, to last week’s destruction by fire of the St. George’s Secondary School. There are issues like the routine security regime that obtains at state schools in order to determine whether those arrangements are not, in many instances, unacceptable. It is also important to ask whether there ought not to be much greater emphasis on the security of school buildings by addressing issues that include the integrity of their electrical fixtures and fittings and on such official school-time activities (the management of Home Economics and Industrial Arts Departments may be a good example here) in order to reduce the chances of fires.
Going forward, there is, of course, the issue of how long it will take to have the students of St. George’s restored to their original schoolhouse, the North Ruimveldt rebuilding is not an encouraging precedent. The assurances which the Ministry of Education will probably be inclined to offer with regard the temporary absorbing of the displaced St. George’s children into alternative schools will not gainsay the fact that there will be some level of disruption and discomfiture for the ‘hosts’ and the ‘guests’ alike for as long as the situation obtains.
If the Ministry wants to persuade its audience of its intention to act in the manifest interest of the displaced children what it must do is to expedite the temporary assignment of the displaced children to alternative schools quickly and begin to move on to the more challenging task of the restoration of St. George’s to the students in a much shorter time frame than is obtaining in the instance of the children of the North Ruimveldt Secondary School. The public treasury, one feels, is, at this time, much better positioned to embark on the restoration of both schools, immediately, than it might have been a year or two ago.
