The two Catholic primary schools that are slated to permanently close their doors as of June 2013 will be used by the government under a lease agreement, announced Minister of Education Jerome Fitzgerald yesterday. While the schools will no longer operate under the Archdiocese of Nassau, Mr Fitzgerald said the government will ensure that both the St. Bede’s and Our Lady’s Schools will be instrumental in the continuing of education in the country.

The Minister said officials had not yet decided how the properties would be used. Mr Fitzgerald said: “I wanted to ensure the public that the schools will remain for the use of education and so the Ministry of Education will be using those facilities. We will decide exactly what we are going to use them for to ensure that certain policy initiatives that the Ministry and the government has taken, these will assist in the fulfilment of these initiatives.”

The Archdiocese is also assuring parents of the affected schools that their children will have a place in one of the remaining Catholic institutions, said Archbishop Patrick Pinder. In addition, for one year, parents will be allowed to pay the same tuition rate they would have paid at the former schools at another Catholic school. Mr Pinder said news of the closures had stirred strong emotion among parents, teachers, and administration alike.

“As you can imagine,” he said, “they (parents) weren’t necessarily happy. In retrospect I realise that I see so many of the marks of disbelief. I see the anger, the denial, all those aspects of real grief because people feel a sense of losing something valuable. I don’t think myself or the director aren’t affected by that so certainly it’s a difficult experience. As for the teachers employed at St. Bede’s and Our Lady’s, Archbishop Patrick Pinder told reporters that they would be absorbed into the Catholic school system.

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