MARIGOT--Parents of Collège Soualiga students gathered in front of the Préfecture on Tuesday morning to demand answers from State services after complaining about numerous malfunctions at the Collège that have resulted, parents say, in students losing 104 hours of study since September.
The complaints concern the Guadeloupe education authority and the education departments of St. Martin and Saint-Barthélemy, in terms of schooling, and the Collectivité with regard to infrastructure. The parents' associations indicated they were unable to get a meeting with the Vice-Recteur, and turned to the State representative.
Carrying placards that stated “Vice Recteur resign” and “Our children are being sacrificed” the parent group was led by Union des Parents d’Eleves Saint-Martin (UPESM), Association Parents Libres, and the Union Nationale des Syndicats Autonomes (UNSA). They began their march from Louis Vanterpool Stadium before gathering in front of the Prefecture at 8:00am. A four-strong delegation of parents was received by Préfecture Secretary General Fabien Sésé, who listened to the parents' grievances.
These included the risk of lack of space despite the repair work on the modular classrooms which will be carried out during the All Saints (Toussaint) vacation; the lack of communication between school principal and parents; absent teachers who have not been replaced (five teachers have been missing since the start of the school year in September: French, English, Spanish, mathematics and history-geography); the need to make up for the 104 hours of lessons lost; difficult working conditions with temperatures in the classrooms rising to 35°C and some teachers forbidding students to drink water during lessons; the possibility offered by the Education Department of taking online courses.
According to the parents, Sésé committed to providing the answers required from the Collectivité and the Education Department by this Friday, the last day of school before the All Saints’ Day vacation.
Since its destruction during Hurricane Irma in 2017 Collège Soualiga, has been housed at Cité Scolaire Robert Weinum in a prefabricated building, but does not have all the classrooms available. The modular classrooms installed in 2019 have been showing signs of failure for more than a year now (unreliable safety barriers and water leaks), and work needs to be carried out.
The classrooms have been condemned since the start of the new school year in September. Following a recent survey, an expert declared three classrooms out of six were “usable” and made available at the beginning of October. Repair work on all the classrooms, scheduled to last three weeks, will be undertaken during the All Saints’ vacation, starting October 20, which lasts for two weeks.
