Minister of Education Says New System Has Corrected IT-VET Payment Issue  

In January, instructors at the Belize City IT-VET complained that they were not receiving their salaries on time and that the faulty system that the Ministry of Education was using had the school meeting their salaries instead. One of the instructors told us that the ministry had not deposited their salaries for months. Soon after the complaint, the ministry blamed the system of payment that was being used. The Minister of Education, Francis Fonseca has assured that the problem has been fixed.

 

Francis Fonseca, Minister of Education

“The root of the problem has been the one-year contracts, so every year they have to go through a process of renewing these one-year contracts, and for many years that served the purposes of both sides because you were taking on professionals, if you like, who didn’t want long-term contracts. They wanted flexibility, but we recognized that has not been working. And so there’s been a deliberate effort on the part of the ministry to try to work with the I.T. VETs to put in place a more sustainable structure, longer-term contracts to make sure that we get them paid through the Smart Stream system. So my latest report is that yes, those issues have been resolved. But we’ll have to wait and see because every time we think that it has been resolved, some other issue arises. But I’m very hopeful that we’ve put in place the right measures and policies now that will make sure that problem doesn’t arise again.”