Tendai Franklyn-Brown, Staff Reporter

Golding

The Association of Principals and Vice-Principals yesterday pulled out of round-table talks with Prime Minister Bruce Golding and Minister of Education Andrew Holness, following comments made by the prime minister over auxiliary fees on his radio call-in programme Wednesday night.

"If we have any case where a child is kept out of school, denied admission to school, or sent home from school because they can't pay the auxiliary fees, well, bangarang," Golding said.

Yesterday, Michael Stewart, president of the association, told The Gleaner that an emergency meeting was held by the organisation's board of executives after Golding's comments.

"We believe the statement that was made was an attack on the integrity of the principals and they are really hurting at this time," Stewart argued.

He said Golding's utterance had further ignited tensions with the school administrators represented by the organisation, who were still reeling from his statement in Parliament last week that some schools were extorting money from students through the system of auxiliary fees.

Meeting went ahead

Despite the pull-out of the principals and vice-principals group, the scheduled meeting went ahead with Golding, Holness and stakeholders from the Jamaica Teachers' Association and the National Parent-Teacher Association of Jamaica. Some principals were also present.

According to a release from the Office of the Prime Minister, the stakeholders agreed with the Government's stance that no child should be denied access to education for failure to pay auxiliary fees.

It was also stated in the release that the stakeholders addressed several issues in addition to auxiliary fees and that work had been started on devising a model for financing education.

The model is expected to be ready by September 2009 and would establish the core educational service the Government is responsible for providing.