The Tribune

By SANCHESKA BROWN

Tribune Staff Reporter

sbrown@tribunemedia.net

UNLESS the government revokes its “silly, unenforceable” immigration policy school administrators will be faced with “thousands of angry and frustrated Bahamian parents” during public school registration next week, former Education Minister Desmond Bannister said.

Mr Bannister, who is also a former FNM senator, said the government has once again “dropped the ball”. He said a minimal amount of research would have “led any sensible person to reconsider such an unworkable policy to the detriment of Bahamian parents”.

He was responding to a new immigration policy that requires every foreign person enrolled in school, even children born in the Bahamas to non-Bahamian parents, to have a student permit and a passport with a residency stamp.

“Of the approximately 50,000 Bahamian students in our school system, a relative small minority are in possession of passports,” he said in a press statement.

“If we optimistically conclude that 50 per cent of them have passports, that still leaves 25,000 students without passports. Those students will appear at school to register armed with their Bahamian birth certificates. The problem: Bahamian birth certificates do not indicate the child’s citizenship.”

He said birth certificates only state where a child was born and where his or her parents reside.

“They do not tell us the citizenship of the parents or the child. The government will have, therefore, not done anything to combat the problem that they seek to alleviate. Unless the government quickly revokes their silly, unenforceable policy, our school administrators will be faced with thousands of angry and frustrated Bahamian parents.”

He said it is not too late to revoke the “poorly considered policy”, adding that it will save children, parents and administrators anguish and frustration.

“Reconsider the policy and take time to implement sensible, workable rules so that the registration process will remain workable and efficient,” Mr Bannister added.

Registration for the fall semester begins on Monday.

Last week, Education Director Lionel Sands told The Tribune that students who do not meet the new immigration requirements for the fall semester will have until the end of December to produce the required documents before the Immigration Department intervenes.

He said it is not his department’s intent to “remove any children from school”, but if the deadline passes without a reasonable excuse, the matter will be passed on to the Department of Immigration.

Mr Sands said all compulsory school aged students – between five and 16 years old – will be required to possess either a Bahamian passport, a birth certificate indicating a mother or father as a Bahamian citizen or a permit authorising the child to reside in The Bahamas.

A press release from the Ministry of Education said along with those documents “students will continue to submit the standard registration information to the principal of the school, for the purposes of registration and entry”.

According to the release, students who do not possess the required documentation for registration will be given a provisional letter of acceptance by the school, which will remain valid until December 31, 2015. Students will have until this date to obtain and submit the required documentation and information.