Chief Education Officer Shirley Wahler outlined “redesign changes” to the two new high schools and why they were necessary amid an array of questions about the feasibility of the People’s Progressive Movement’s vision for the structures by United Democratic Party members in Finance Committee on Friday, 26 June.
Mrs. Wahler said the John Gray and Clifton Hunter schools have gone through significant changes to the first design, especially for the information technology departments, as that subject matter is always changing.
“So that the school’s design can better facilitate the curriculum, we have changed from Town Hall Schools to classrooms,” Mrs. Wahler said.
She explained the open space learning concept in which the schools were first conceived has now been curtailed with furniture to create more separation, so there is not as much free reign and added that sound separation was also being viewed as an important consideration in redesign.
Roughly $2.8 million dollars has been spent on work for the schools, according to Education Minister Rolston Anglin.
During the course of the meeting, Mrs. Wahler’s remarks were questioned by West Bay MLA Cline Glidden, who asked the chief education officer whether it was appropriate – by her saying that the redesign has “now” made the schools feasible from a learning and interaction standpoint, to draw the inference that previous design was not.
However, Mrs. Wahler seemed reluctant to say the previous design concept of the schools was not ideal. Instead she referred to them being ideal now without stating any particular views on the matter.
After being pressed by Mr. Glidden on the issue, Chairman of the Finance Committee McKeeva Bush, who is also the Islands’ Premier stopped the questioning saying that he understood Mrs. Wahler’s reluctance to state the obvious, but he too had made a similar inference to that of Mr. Glidden’s and it seemed to him that the design of the schools, lauded as the future of learning in the Cayman Islands, was far from ideal.
Chief Officer in the Ministry of Education Mary Rodrigues interjected during the discussion, explaining to all in the chamber the facility was not the governing factor in success and that the focus need not be on the solely on the buildings.
The completion date for Clifton Hunter High School is slated for February, 2012, while the date for completion of the John Gray High School is set for 2013, according to Education Minister Rolston Anglin. He added that the latter was having to be done in phasing, as cash becomes available.
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As the original designer of the schools I can say that the modern building design reflected the previous administration’s desire to bring Cayman’s education into the 21st Century. For it to work, major changes would have been needed in the area of curriculum development (for example going from a teacher directed model to a student-centered, project based model) and of course professional development for teachers. These were not done and, despite a mountain of evidence that the world has moved away from the industrial factory model of education, Cayman has decided to stick with this model. In that case, it is actually a good idea to redesign the schools to the traditional classroom-based model as the current administration has decided. Of course it would be legitimate for the taxpayers in Cayman to ask why the government is investing tens of millions of dollars to simply reinforce (perhaps for the next 30 years or more) a failed educational model. How will this massive infusion of funds do anything to improve education in the Cayman Islands? After all that was the original goal of this program — but that seems to have been abandoned and the arguments have deteriorated into a name calling game.
As usual, when all is said and done, the losers are the children of Cayman Islands — not to mention the future economy of the country which requires a different kind of workforce with skills that the factory model of education will simply not deliver.
Prakash Nair
President, Fielding Nair International
http://fieldingnair.com
Rolston,
Stop your nonsense. You just want to slow it down.
Why is it that our elected politicians have to go abroad to recruit and enter into contracts with unknown foreign building contractors to build our schools and government buildings? What happened to Heber Arch, and other local building contractors? Is it because no body local wants to share the grease on their hands with the politicians, and that our own local contractors deal honestly? Something is very wrong. We have construction companies with college degreed building contractors, whether yes or no and they still can not get a government contract to build a simple school? Come on Cayman is gone and people we are in serious trouble because of the people we keep electing. They are actually sending billions of dollars overseas to the Chinese, the Indians and every body else our own Caymanian contractors capable of building schools are denied these contracts? Give me a break. And now Big Mac has the unemployment list from the Labor Office to do what with? May I ask.
To make his short list or who is PPM and who is UDP and only the UDP supporters wind up getting jobs? Quite frankly the UDP performance is so rotten that they can’t even deliver jobs for their own supporters
Chicken and ribs is the best they can do for the unemployed? What a pity.
What a joke. Open classrooms. High school student are climbing the walls now. What happens when theres no walls. Give up the dart board approach to education and follow a model that is known to work. What will you throw at next? By the time you get it right, it will be time to start over again. Smoke and mirrors from the government is all we see. Time to be proactive and not reactive. You cannot continue to fool all of Cayman all of the time.