Back to School for Third Term

Across the country, thousands of primary and secondary school students returned to their classrooms today, officially bringing to an end their Easter vacation. While they are settling into the final leg of the academic year, their teachers are still waiting for the ten percent salary reduction to be returned to their monthly income. This morning, president of the Belize National Teachers Union, Senator Elena Smith spoke about the morale of teachers going into third term.

Elena Smith

Elena Smith, President, B.N.T.U.

“In terms of the ten percent, we have a lot of teachers who, while they have heard the pronouncement, they are waiting to get that in hand first for them to believe and I think we can understand the level of disbelief that our teachers may have in terms of this matter. We know that we from our part have done our best to ensure that our teachers suffer as minimal as possible. We tried, we tried to work with the banks to get the interest rates for them, you know, all of those sorts of things. But there are those who are very happy to know that it will be reinstated but we still have those who, while they are happy to know that, they are still skeptical, and I guess we can understand that. In terms of the return to the classroom, now we have not done a formal poll of our members to find out from them what they feel, how they feel or how they think, that sort of thing. But if we go based on initially, we have a lot of teachers who were very happy to return to the classroom because they felt that they needed that one on one with their students, they needed to have the children around them and some of them felt that they were not doing as good a job with distance because they were unable to control what was happening at home.”