PHILIPSBURG--A disputed number of students who graduated from TKL 4 (formerly MAVO) recently and are opting transition to the HAVO 3 stream might have to forgo the upcoming school year or relocate off-island. They have been told there are not enough teachers in the HAVO 3 stream to make their transition possible. It concerns students who did not qualify to enter HAVO 4.

Parents said they had been informed by HAVO/VWO Head Mark Soree that they should consider sending their children to Aruba, Curaçao or the Netherlands, as there would be no way for the school board to recruit teachers to accommodate them.

Parents claimed Soree had told them on one occasion that 13 students wanted to go to HAVO 3. On a later occasion he said 23, according to the parents. However, according to School Board for Secondary Education (SVOBE) Executive Director Joseph Rogers, only the parents of four students had made their predicament known to the school board.

Therefore, he explained, the school board and the MPC directors will have to determine what the next step will be with regard to the students. He pointed out that it was not a simple case of hiring one teacher, but a number of teachers for various subject to accommodate a handful of students. The cost of this would have to be seriously considered, he said.

He explained that the predicament had come to light after the school had projected that it would need only one HAVO 3 class for the upcoming school year and had planned accordingly. He added that the teachers slated to teach HAVO 3 were already pushing overtime, based on projections, and said he did not foresee a scenario in which additional hours were added to their schedules.

"More students came into the system than we anticipated," he said.

Any solution for the students probably will not come before the first week of August, when the directors of the school return to the island. Even if the school board decides to allow the students into HAVO 3, recruiting teachers at this stage will be a nearly impossible task and could lead to protests from the teachers union if current teachers are forced to work additional hours.

In the meantime, parents said they were "fed up and angry" with the school's response thus far. They wonder if "these people" don't understand the stress of not knowing where or whether their children will be going to school in less than a month.

They also said they had gone to every department in St. Maarten, including to Education Commissioner William Marlin, in an attempt to obtain some urgent intervention. They were told that it was an issue of the school board.

"Just think about the cost of having to relocate children to Aruba, Curaçao or the Netherlands. And who is to guarantee that we can even get them into a school at this point? The school knew of the situation before the summer break and still nothing. They went on vacation and left us here with no answers," an angry parent said.

The parents also explained that the fields of study the students would like to take up when they started tertiary education required a HAVO education. Rogers said there were other routes students could take; for example, MBO level education. The problem is that there is also no MBO in St. Maarten.

"At the moment there is not much we can do until we meet with the directors," Rogers said.