By MIRANDA LA ROSE Saturday, September 15 2012

Industrial arts teachers and students of St Augustine Secondary School have packed their equipment to move from the building that was their workshop, but the building which they are to now occupy is not yet ready.

The building which the teachers and students have vacated will become an extension of the Hugh Wooding Law School.

The equipment is packed and some 40 students preparing for the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate examinations next year, have not started their “practicals,” teaching staff told Newsday yesterday.

“We may have to unpack because no one is telling us anything, and the students have exams,” a staff member who requested anonymity told Newsday.

The staffer, said they were informed three days before school reopened, that they were to pack their tools and other equipment for removal to another building on the school compound.

The workshop attendants, staffers said, were called out during the August holidays to start packing tools and other material for moving.

The staffers said they were not upset about moving, but they wanted the other building identified, for them to be made ready as quickly as possible.

“In the meantime, we will have to unpack,” one staffer said.

Efforts to get a comment from the Ministry of Education which has responsibility for secondary schools was not forthcoming yesterday.

Minister of Tertiary Education and Skills Training, Fazal Karim, who took part in the discussions with Minister of Education, Dr Tim Gopeesingh and Attorney General Anand Ramlogan, told Newsday that the Education Ministry agreed to lend the building to the law school to help alleviate its current need for space.

He noted that new buildings were constructed to accommodate the secondary school.

The building identified for the law school was an old one that had been earmarked for demolition.

Government took the decision not to demolish the old buildings.

When the building identified for use by the law school is taken over, he said the Hugh Wooding Law School would renovate it.

That building, he said, was only meant for temporary accommodation as some of the scope of works will be transferred to the new branch of the law school, to be built in Debe.