ITVET faces challenges

Patrick Faber

The Ministry of Education’s massive vocational training initiative, ITVET, is also seeing several of its programs canceled.  According to Minister of Education Patrick Faber, enrollment at the institution’s various branches has been minimal forcing the school to eliminate a number of courses.  A task force will soon be organized to visit each department in an effort to increase the number of technical students attending ITVET.  The objective is to raise the student population by at least fifty percent in time for the start of the upcoming academic year.

Patrick Faber, Minister of Education

“We have been spending far too much money on the ITVETs and not getting back proper results and as a result of that I am happy to announce that a team that is going to be headed by the Orange Walk ITVET manager, Mr. Armando Gomez, will shortly come into effect.  Both Mr. Gomez and Mr. Kenroy Ellis from the Belize City CET are away right now on a training program in Taiwan.  As soon as they get back to the country later on this week a team will be set out to look at what is going on in our ITVETs and their big task is to improve and increase the enrolment to at least fifty percent by the start of the new school year in the end of August/September.  So, you know, we want to send the signal loud and clear that we have been concerned. You’ve heard me talk about this before and we’re not sitting on our hands with it, we are putting things into place to make sure that we get a better bang for our buck out of the ITVETs.  Those who complain for instance about programs being cut must understand that that is the nature of the ITVETs.  I don’t know the exact place where those stories are coming from but those who are involved will understand that the ITVETs create programs according to the needs of the society out there and when it is that there are no more clients coming in asking for that program or when it is that we believe the need for those programs are no more then those programs are cut.”