As Barbados prepares to welcome the start of the Trinity school term this coming Monday, the country’s Ministry of Education Transformation has announced new steps to safeguard environmental health standards across all school campuses, responding to disruptive incidents earlier this year that forced multiple school closures. Minister of Education Chad Blackman confirmed that a dedicated interdepartmental team has been assembled to draft formal, nationwide protocols that will set binding standards for maintaining clean, safe learning environments, with a full public unveiling of the framework expected in the near future.
The catalyst for this policy push came in March, when six primary and secondary schools across Barbados — St Bartholomew Primary, St Paul’s Primary, Charles F Broome Memorial Primary, Mount Tabor Primary, Christ Church Girls’ School, and Hilda Skeene Primary — experienced serious environmental hazards that upended normal teaching and learning operations. The widespread issues forced some campuses to send students home early, while others were forced to suspend classes entirely for multiple days, prompting outcry from educators and families.
The Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT) had previously publicly called for a standardized national set of guidelines to address environmental health risks in schools, arguing that consistent rules for routine cleaning, sanitation, regular infrastructure inspections, and preventive maintenance were critical to avoiding repeated disruptions. Minister Blackman, speaking to Barbados TODAY on the sidelines of the Barbados National Student Council’s Elections held at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre, confirmed the ministry had answered that call, noting that the working group has already made substantial progress on the policy framework.
Beyond updating internal protocols for campus maintenance, Blackman also issued a direct appeal to private businesses and private property owners located adjacent to school grounds, urging them to take greater responsibility for maintaining clean, pest-free surroundings. He emphasized that unkempt adjacent properties — ranging from food retail outlets to parking lots and vacant lots — often create conditions that attract pests such as rodents, which can easily cross onto school property and put student and staff health at risk.
“Our schools have been kept clean. We’ve intensified our cleaning efforts and we’re ramping up even further, but we also want to use this and, as Minister of Education, really plead with our stakeholders outside of the school to keep their facilities clean because it impacts our schools, it impacts learning, it impacts teaching,” Blackman stated.
The minister also offered a formal assurance that all six schools affected by the March environmental incidents have undergone full professional sanitization and remediation work, and are fully prepared to welcome students and staff back for the new term. He added that ministry inspectors have confirmed all remediated campuses meet full health and safety standards, but reiterated that unregulated conditions on adjacent private property remain an ongoing, uncontrollable risk that requires cooperation from local business owners to mitigate.