Teachers’ Day celebrated in Belmopan
Teachers’ Day was originally scheduled for May fifteenth but because of the flu scare and the warnings about mass gatherings it was postponed for today. Teachers from throughout the country were bussed to Garden City, Belmopan, where ceremonies were held in honor of the country’s educators at the University of Belize’s gymnasium. While there have been many recent kinks in the system, today’s event was meant to be uplifting. Speeches were given by Prime Minister Barrow as well as Leader of the Opposition John Briceño. And according to Education Minister Patrick Faber, his ministry wanted to show appreciation as well as offer education opportunities to teachers.
Patrick Faber, Minister of Education
“Indeed we need to do more in order to fix with what is wrong with education in this country. I used a portion of my speech as well to speak to the teachers to try to inspire them to do greater work. I believe that we have many committed teachers as is very much the case demonstrated here today. But we need teachers to feel appreciated. We need for them to understand we have this greater role to play. So that was what my speech was about. I also invited the Prime Minister and of course the leader of the opposition to be here and to make presentations this morning to show that one, this is a national effort that our teachers are important to this nation and two that it is not a political issue what we are doing in education. We looked at the system at the primary school level and found out that there are eight hundred and sixty primary school teachers who have an associate degree in some other content area but they don’t have the pedagogy, the don’t have the pedagogical skills. And so we try to find a way of how to get these teachers trained and trained quickly. And as a result, we have come up with a program that will be run by U.B. and most of the tertiary institutions that offer teacher education. And so as a result we’ll be setting up centers in all parts of the country, all districts will have one center, some more than one. We will put a center in San Pedro and we will provide free tuition scholarships for three hundred and fifty teachers to start but we hope to take it onto the eight hundred or so teachers that are in the system that have the same need.”
Faber says that the teacher training program will commence in the summertime. Operating in the summer means teachers won’t need to apply for study leave and the ministry won’t be burdened with the additional problem of finding the finances to pay temporary teachers.
