Corporal punishment and other issues discussed at task force meeting

Darnelle Sterling Roches

An education task force was recently set up to address specific issues within the Ministry of Education.  It will soon get down to the business of discussing alternative measures to corporal punishment and other burning issues that the Belize National Teachers Union and the Ministry of Education have clashed over.  B.N.T.U. representative Darnelle Sterling Roches says the inaugural meeting was productive.  And when we caught up with the Minister of Education today he said that at the end of the six month period, an alternative will be found to corporal punishment.

Darnelle Sterling Roches, Representative, B.N.T.U.

“The task force is looking at alternative forms of discipline and for want of a better word we say alternative forms.  So we’re looking at different forms of discipline that can be implemented in the schools and reinforcement basically of what is already there.  We, our first meeting, we just had an inaugural meeting so that first meeting dealt with logistics; things like when we’re going to meet, where, frequency, stuff like that so to say that we have gotten into dealing with the issues as such no, not in a systematic manner.  We discussed and there are a lot of ideas and I do believe that it will be fruitful and we’re trying to stick within our six months period.”

Patrick Faber, Minister of Education

“I think they used that meeting to elect from among themselves the leaders of that task force.  I think they were, selected were from the ministry Ms. Dativa Martinez to be co-chair and also Ms. Maria Zabaneh from the Bishop’s Commission who will chair.  I did not stay for the entire meeting but my understanding is that they used that first inaugural meeting to come up with a structure of how they are going to operate to work some of the basic logistics and I believe next week they will have the first official business meeting of the task force and hopefully we can get things in order by the time the six month time period expires.”

The task force established by the Ministry of Education is comprised of various stakeholders within the education system.  It is expected that at the end of the six months they will introduce an alternate means of discipline within the classroom.