Minister Pleads that Parents Ensure Children Are Fed Well
‘We provide free transport, a free education grant, free textbooks, we provide boat and boat fares and from this year onwards we will provide sanitary pads for girls’
Minister for Education, Heritage and Arts, Premila Kumar, is pleading with parents to ensure their children are provided breakfast at home and packed lunches to take to school.
She made the plea after the ministry was told that students were not bringing their lunches to school.
Ms Kumar said they had a programme that could assist these children.
“I am requesting the heads of schools and the class teachers to vet and find out whether it is a genuine case or not. We have been receiving information from the ground that there are parents that don’t prepare breakfast and lunch for their children,” Ms Kumar
said.
“This is the information we get from students when found without food in school. This is unacceptable because there is something called parental responsibility. Parents must be responsible for raising their children.
“They cannot expect teachers and schools to babysit children for them. This is not fair.”
Schools are made for children’s education and the teachers are doing wonderful work, doing their best in the worst of times.
They give 100 per cent and work around the clock to make sure that the learning losses which the children have gone through in the past two years are recovered.
The ministry needs parents to step up and start taking charge of their children.
“If they need guidance or help, we will be able to help them, but parents must show interest in their children,” she said.
Ms Kumar pleaded with school management, community members and school heads to make sure children go to school.
“I plead that you go back to your communities where the school is and talk to parents to start sending them to school because education is free,” she said.
“We provide free transport, a free education grant, free textbooks, we provide boat and boat fares and from this year onwards we will provide sanitary pads for girls.”
With the ministry providing assistance, the minister commented that she does not understand why parents cannot send their children to school.