Forde slams NDP over education

Lone female Senator Rochelle Forde of the Unity Labour Party (ULP) Government has slammed the New Democratic Party (NDP) for what she described as failing to ensure that the Nation was educated over their 17 years of governance.

In an address to Parliament recently, when she moved the motion for the “Revolution in Education”, where four of the five NDP parliamentarians voted against and one declined to vote, Senator Forde chided that the NDP never built new schools, but rather relocated and refurbished them.{{more}}

The young female Senator accused the NDP of doing nothing but making “plans” for education but never really “executing” their objectives while thousands of students went through a poor system. She said that students had a poor library and none at the A’ Level College for years.

She highlighted that under the ULP administration students are not just floating but are swimming and excelling because of the Education Revolution.

Meanwhile Government Senator Richard Williams also supported the motion for the Education Revolution, noting that the most precious resource of any Country was its people and pointed out that Japan was an excellent example of a progressive nation.

Williams said the NDP was allowed to be in office for so many years because they kept the people uneducated and dependent on them. Giving examples of the ULP’s revolution in education, Williams noted that since taking office the enrollment at the A’level College has tripled while that of the School of Nursing has increased five times.

The Senator chastised the NDP for not making adequate provisions for students to move forward and noted that it was only the very few who got preferential scholarships and those who could have afforded higher education were educated.

The Senator said under the ULP, more people are being educated because his administration now backs loans for persons who had no means of paying the cost of higher learning.

Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Arnhim Eustace told Searchlight he did not support the ULP’s Revolution in Education” motion because his party has a policy position “that a lot more needed to be done to upgrade education at the primary level. We had people graduating from primary school who could not read. They could not cover the basics and therefore absorbing them into the secondary school system was a problem unless you had significant and consistent remedial work and teachers for that kind of work.”

Eustace said that Senator Rochelle Forde’s claim that NDP did nothing for education and built no schools was nothing but a lot of “nonsense.” He said institutions such as the Georgetown Secondary and Campden Park Secondary Schools were built by the NDP but she chose to call them replacement schools.

The Opposition Leader accused the ULP of doing the work on education for self praise, “I am not going to involve myself in anything for self congratulation. The ULP is bringing to parliament a motion to congratulate itself, I am not in that! Let people judge how they perform and we would see the reflection of that whenever they have the election again.”