 Welcome to NTN Nightly, I am Janelle Norvel. This edition stops stories. Slide changes have been announced to the COVID-19 prevention and control regulations. The Department of Education continues to fine-tune measures in response to COVID-19 and the Youth Empowerment Project to impact parenting skills. Slide changes have been announced to the COVID-19 prevention and control physical distancing regulations. Following a meeting with the Cabinet of Ministers on Monday 18th January 2021 and the National Emergency Management Advisory Council on Tuesday 19th January, the COVID-19 protocols were amended on the advice of the command centre and the Ministry of Health. While the protocols in the main remain unchanged, restrictions on the sale of alcohol have been instituted. The sale of alcohol is not permitted at supermarkets, shops, minimats, bars, gas stations and restaurants. The amendments come into effect Wednesday, January 20, 2021 and will remain in effect for 21 days. Meanwhile, Chief Education Officer Dr. Fiona Phillip Meyer has confirmed that mechanisms for the effective management of COVID-19 in at least one secondary school have been instituted to safeguard the school population. The Department of Education in a press release earlier this week identified the Barbano Secondary School as one of the institutions where procedures have taken effect in response to the threat of the virus. Barbano Secondary is temporarily closed and instruction has reverted to distributed learning for three days. Officials indicate that some teachers may have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus. Dr. Meyer addressed the matter in a press briefing held Tuesday 19th January. We have taken this stance as a precautionary measure to safeguard all stakeholders and to continue to monitor and reflect upon the situation so as to also give the Department of Health the necessary support needed. We have also had other situations whereby under the guidance of health we have worked with smaller groupings of schools and in that case a particular class to monitor and to maintain the precautionary posture as I said earlier in terms of any contact tracing students who may have been exposed. Minister for Education, Innovation, Generations and Sustainable Development Honourable Dr. Gill Rigabet says she understands and appreciates the anxiety and concern of parents at this time. She assured that school protocols continue to be fine-tuned ever since the first reported case at the Castries Comprehensive Secondary School last October. Honourable Dr. Rigabet says the ministry guided by health officials is juggling several variables including working parents who are left no options for child supervision, students who may have underlying conditions, parents who may be ill-equipped to provide support with the online learning modality as well as parents who rely on nutritional and psychosocial support provided under the school setting. Do we want to jeopardize the well-being of our students and educators or persons who work within the school plan? Absolutely not! Would we prefer if we had the option to halt schools and wait for COVID to do its thing? Like the health professionals remind us all the time, this situation is fluid. We don't know how the COVID situation is going to evolve and so what we have been doing and we continue to do is to be as predictive as is possible. It is very well defined in our national schools protocols what should obtain in tandem with what we are also adopting from regional and international agencies. Ministry officials say they welcome input for the constant refinement of the protocols and overall well-being of the school populations. Permanent Secretary in the Department of Education, Innovation and Gender Relations is Michelle Charles. The Ministry of Education wishes to continue all of the necessary dialogue that is going to allow us to put in place recommendations and initiatives that are going to benefit everyone across the sector. We are not focused only on, as the minister indicated quite clearly, education and instruction but all of the other facets that come to the fore within the education landscape and this is critical for us. We are looking to develop our students holistically. We are also taking into consideration the impact on our teachers, our ancillary staff, our leadership within our school system and so for us as we chart these uncharters, as we go through these uncharted waters, whatever decisions that we make really are in our view in the best interest of our education stakeholders. Still with education, the Department of Education, Innovation and Gender Relations acknowledging the concerns of all stakeholders including parents with the reopening of school says it is cognizant that some parents may decide to keep students home. As a result, the Ministry is exploring several avenues that will not disrupt the students instruction including homeschooling. Dr. Fiona Phillip Meyer is the Chief Education Officer and explains the process of application. We have had requests for homeschooling. Applications are to be filled in. We have a specific form that the parents are to fill in that can be emailed to a parent. Similarly, they can come into the office to get a physical copy. Any issues of medical concerns that parents have, we will look at those applications and liaise with them. The procedures that the schools are informed of the application, there's generally a bit of background check that goes into it to ensure that we're doing the right thing for our children. We want to respect our parents and give them that option but we also want to remind them that schools are areas where the protocols have been put in place and we make every effort to ensure that it's effectively done. But in the event a parent does decide that they really want to keep their children at home or their child at home, it is the responsibility of a parent as it speaks to homeschooling to ensure that they look at the Camdo website where the curriculum documents are placed. We encourage the collaboration with the school but we need to let the parents know that there isn't a general obligation on the part of the schools as the parent would have applied for homeschooling. But at every instant that we can support that, we would do so. The chief education officer says while she understands the concerns of parents, homeschooling is not an easy task. However, the department remains committed to assisting parents. We continue to say that the reason why teachers keep the education system as it is is because they're qualified to do what they're supposed to do. You know, similarly to all the other sectors, individuals are placed there because of their qualifications, expertise, and experience. So we recognize that our parents aren't teachers. We said that from the onset unless a parent is a qualified teacher. So we want to work with them, but we appreciate that the schools can do so much. So we want to ask parents to have a good thing about the option of homeschooling if they feel very strongly about it and can get the necessary academic as well as social support to do so. That is something we will consider. But we do not take it lightly, but we also want to balance that out with issues of any medical that a child may have and the anxiety that a parent may have likewise. In more COVID-19-related developments, this time on the economic front, Caribbean islands are continuing to lobby for concessional funding from the international community. The efforts are now more crucial given the economic fallout from COVID-19. A report by ACLAC indicates declining foreign direct investments of up to 55% in the region. There has been a 23% reduction in foreign trade at the domestic level, and international trade is down 32%. Travel tax receipts have fallen nearly 80% with the impact of the tourism industry. During a recent UN-ACLAC meeting, Jamaica's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Senator Hon. Kamena Johnson-Smith painted the picture facing the Caribbean. The stark reality is that systemic deficiencies exist and have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Already high deficits and debt in the region have negatively impacted the ability of countries to address daily operations of government, much less to finance development and achieve the SDGs. Furthermore, being the second most climate-vulnerable region in the world, we bear the recurrent cycle of capital cost and indebtedness caused not by profligacy, but infrastructure damage caused by severe weather events, many of which do not even reach international headlines. These circumstances collectively ground our unique vulnerability and our belief in the need for reclassification of our economies for the purposes of determining access to grant funding, the terms and costs of debt, and other related matters so intrinsic to recovery. Caribbean governments, the Jamaican minister added, have taken the tough decision to avoid lockdowns given the unstable economies. Senator Smith noted that the region is experiencing no hand-holding by lending agencies. While global leadership acknowledges that no one must be left behind, there have been no debt relief initiatives or new funding solutions allocated for middle-income countries like those in the Caribbean. In addition, there appears to be limited interest among advanced and developed countries to provide additional funding either through special drawing rights allocation and or World Bank capital increases. Accordingly, many middle-income countries continue to face the very great and grave possibility of a systemic debt crisis with many sovereign and corporate defaults in the 2021-22 financial period and perhaps even in the medium term. In the totality of these circumstances, it is of great importance that we move expeditiously towards forging a fresh consensus, a global consensus in respect of the classification of middle-income countries, including small island developing states of the Caribbean. Caribbean governments, including Prime Minister the Honourable Alan Shastney, have been persistent in calls for the region not to be assessed for concessional funding based on the GDP. GDP alone, Senator Smith pointed out, does not give a true reflection of the development status or the fragility of an economy. This is NTN Nightly. Please stay with us. In an effort to ensure patient and first responder safety, the St. Lucia Fire Service has reviewed its patient transfer procedures, especially for patients with respiratory distress. Face masks will be provided. At no time during transportation should the face mask be removed. Please be patient and cooperative during this time to ensure you receive the best possible care while keeping our first responders safe. Welcome back. The Ministry of Equity, Social Justice, Local Government and Empowerment is realising gains with the Youth Empowerment Project. The holistic intervention project focuses on young people, especially at-risk youth. The project is being piloted via a multi-faceted approach in the constituency of central castries and consists of several programmes, including the Integrated Court Diversion Programme, the Integrated Community-Based Transformation Programme, Employability Enhancement Initiatives and the Parenting Programme, amongst others. The YAP is collaborating with the Division of Human Services to execute the Parenting Programme. Director of Human Services, Beverly Anne Poirte, highlighted the significance of the programme. Based on anecdotal evidence and some statistics, it is recognised that many of the children or the young persons who find themselves either in conflict with the law or just exhibiting those kinds of behaviours that we don't expect, there tended to be some kind of issues with parenting, either with supervision, absent parents, or just inability to parent properly. And so the Youth Empowerment Project, they reached out to us at the Division of Human Services asking for assistance in strategising as to how this could actually work within the various communities. So over the past few months, we've actually been putting this programme together to see how it is we can reach out to the parents within the four target communities and also trying to assist parents who are clients of the Division of Human Services. A Train the Trainers programme will be rolled out for parents. The aim is to equip parents with the required skills to provide a proper upbringing to their children and reduce at-risk behaviours. We want to provide them with that information that is going to assist them in helping their children, in helping to raise their children and not allow environment only to be the cause of certain behaviours. So we would really like to see that whole thing of nature and the nurture to have some kind of synergy. So yes, based on the community you're from, it's often said that the behaviours there and everything here trigger certain behaviours, but we also want to have the nurturing aspect of it, whereby parents within the community and the community itself, because if we're going to be targeting multiple parents within that community, the community itself to become parents to the children within that community. Director of Human Services, Beverly Ann Hoyard. January 16, 2021 saw the coming into being of the first of six collections points piloting the incentivised collection of plastic waste in St. Lucia through the Replast OECS Pilot Plastic Recycling Project. The Grozile Replast collection point operated from the park adjoining the Rodney Heights Aquatic Centre. It is one of three points of the northern region. The operations and schedule collection days will be managed by the Grozile Constituency Council. The other two will be located at Morsi and Grand Riviere. The Replast OECS Pilot Plastic Recycling Project launched in May 2019 is a two-year public-private initiative being implemented by Unite Caribbean. The plastic collected will be exported to a recycling plant in the Caribbean. The first pilot country St. Lucia with subsequent replication in the OECS countries. To date, the Replast OECS project has facilitated an experimental shipment working with local recyclers. This included two 40-foot containers of billed pet bottles of approximately 26,000 pounds. This exported plastic waste would normally be disposed of and, as a result, has increased the life of the landfill. That brings us to the end of NTN Nightly. Join us next time at 7pm with a repeat at 7am. You can also catch up with us anytime on the St. Lucia Government Facebook page or YouTube channel. I am General Norvel.