BARBADOS UNION OF TEACHERS (BUT) president Karen Best is "happy" with the proposals for education presented by Prime Minister David Thompson yesterday in his first Budgetary proposals.

But she is particularly pleased with three of them: the free bus rides for school children; the expansion of training and retraining for teachers; and plans to build a new secondary school and more nursery schools.

She told the DAILY NATION in a telephone interview that her union supported the idea of the free bus rides because there were students at her school, Hillaby/Turner's Hall Primary, that she had to pay fares for to ensure they attended school.

The BUT was one of the interest groups that met with Thompson in a series of consultations ahead of the Budget presentation.

"When we met with him we asked about building more nursery schools and three more secondary schools, but he said he was giving us one and the training and retraining of teachers.

"We are very happy because this is something the BUT has been calling for for the longest while because we have a number of teachers in the system who have not been trained, and also we have teachers in the system who have been trained many years ago and have not been retrained. We got what we wanted," Best said.

Matthew Farley, public relations officer of the Barbados Association of Principals of Public Secondary Schools, said instead of threatening to ban students from travelling on public service vehicles (PSV) if their behaviour did not improve, he would have gone for a "straight ban" because he could not see "any improvement" in the "ZR" or PSV culture down the road.

Farley added that free travel aboard the state-owned Transport Board buses for students was "a logical extension of Government's commitment" to providing free education and hoped that the students would not vandalise the buses.

The Garrison Secondary School principal also called for the Transport Board to add new routes to areas it was not now servicing to keep students from travelling on the PSVs altogether. (DS)