THE EDITOR: The events of the last few days are all too familiar: the brown torrent of water covering the roads, the screams of trapped voters, and the laments over the loss of household goods, business stocks, and other material possessions.
To this familiar annual litany comes a new note of alarm: the desperation of children trapped in their homes, unable to take their CSEC or CAPE exams. Many students in the center and south of the country are in the midst of written exams for which they have been preparing for several years and which will affect their immediate and long-term future.
Opposition deputies, councilors and councilors have done and are doing everything possible to help these students get to their exam centres.
However, it is the Government that controls the resources, and I urge you to immediately mobilize your resources to ensure that our children can get to and from their examination centers.
Floods, poor roads and the harsh social conditions we all live in have already taken a toll on these innocents. Through no fault of their own, the places where they live, study and fight have become, in some cases, unbearable.
They already enter the exam room with all this hanging around their necks. I beg the Government not to add the more serious injury of not being able to enter the examination room.
For many of these students, especially those from remote communities, one promise of our nation still stands: the promise of an education as a means of upward mobility.
The government should treat this issue as an emergency as if they are unable to sit their exams in the stipulated period over the next few days and weeks, the lives of these children will be stagnant for a year as there is no guarantee that CXC will accommodate them. . write these exams later this year.
The government can help:
* Identify who, where and how many students are affected.
* Allocate resources (4-wheel drive vehicles and appropriate drivers) and perhaps safe temporary accommodation, closer to test centers, for those in particularly affected areas.
*Ask CXC for alternate arrangements for those students who actually missed their exams due to the flood.
All my colleagues and I already have an idea of โโwhere the most affected students are, and as always, we are ready to cooperate with the government to help our young constituents.
I also urge, as many have done before me, that the government do what is necessary with common sense to ensure that the annual flooding becomes a mere inconvenience rather than a real emergency where lives, work and studies are interrupted. are directly affected.
I urge the Government to put political games aside and think about the well-being of our students, including their mental well-being, considering that they would have spent years preparing for these exams. Their future is the future of the country.
DINESH RAMBALLY
Deputy, West Chaguanas
