Minister of Education plans to move some youths off the streets
patrick faber
Earlier in the week, we reported on the Dr. Herbert Gayle’s Report on Male Social Participation and Violence in Urban Belize, which like the Police Department’s Harold Crooks Report, will be mouthed by social partners as well as political pundits for a long time. Gayle’s report scrutinized the shortcomings of the education system which has more than eleven thousand three hundred youths excluded from primary school and a total of nineteen thousand seven hundred excluded from high school. And when it comes to tertiary level enrolment, Belize is far behind most Central American and Caribbean neighbours. It’s a huge problem that can’t be solved overnight. But today, Minister of Education Patrick Faber said that the problem of the kids outside the education system is not only a problem for his ministry but for all stakeholders including parents and social partners. Faber also spoke of a plan that would soon take over a thousand five hundred kids off the streets into an alternative program to be held at two Belize City locations.
Patrick Faber, Minister of Education
“In fact, we have not officially rolled out our plan as to how it will work. In fact, I intend to do so at the House meeting on August sixth at the time of ministers’ statement where I will disclose the full plan. But just to give you a snapshot into it, it is a program that is targeted primarily to those out of school youths in Belize City. It is not going to take care of eleven thousand students and it’s not going to be the panacea of everything. It’s just a small attempt and I say a small attempt because we will only aim to garner about fifteen hundred students out of that eleven thousand, which is at that age. If we should learn anything at all from what the Gayle study is showing us, it should be that it is everybody’s business, something that the Ministry of Education has long been saying. It cannot be that we just say oh the Ministry of Education or the education system is in shambles and it’s not working. It must be that we must now be encouraged to put our shoulders to the wheel collectively; that is the church, that is the community, that is everybody who has a stake, which is everybody in our view, putting their shoulders to the wheel in order to make sure that things become better.”
Jose Sanchez
“Okay, one do the things pointed out by Dr. Gayle, the universal or the millennium goals were a bit off. Latin America has seven point two percent of its children of age six to twelve out of school. Belize it seems it’s fourteen percent. How can we accomplish this by 2015?”
Patrick Faber
“Well, it is not only Belize that is not meeting the goals. In fact, I read in a UN publication, a plea coming for nations to put their money where their mouth is and to in fact put more resources into making sure this goal is met that a hundred percent of our primary school aged children get to school. And that is a serious goal to work towards so I don’t want people to get the impression it is only Belize that is failing. There are other countries in the world that are behind.”
