Major differences between the initiators of the Dominica State College (DSC) and the ministry of education have threatened to stymie development at the fledgling institution, the Sun has learned.

    The root of the problem, several education officials told the Sun, was the failure of the management team that preceded the current board, and the minister of education, Roosevelt Skerrit, to keep the administration of the ministry informed about what was happening during the process of the setting up of the college.

    "The minister has all the information," one senior official who spoke to the Sun on condition that he was not named said, stressing on the word all. "Several parents are concerned but I just don't have the information."

    "Leading up to the formation of the college the coordinator (Zacharia Pollock) was reporting directly to the minister. A lot of decisions were taken (but) we don't know how they were taken and who ratified (these decision)," another education official said.

    "There are a lot of questions asked …(about) uniforms, fees, the opening of the college. We don't know how or where these decisions were taken and there are no records of these decisions with the administration of the ministry (of education)," one concerned official added.

    The officials said that the antagonism between management committee members Pollock and Dr. Hilroy Thomas on the one hand and the ministry of education on the other, have resulted in "a lot of pressure" on parents of students registered for the college and the students themselves.

    They spoke of first year students making several visits to the college in an attempt to find out about the opening of the institution, but getting no word; of people purchasing uniforms only to discover later that there was to be a different uniform and of people claiming to have paid registration fees but not receiving receipts.

    There were questions, they said, about the fees structure and a scholarship programme.

    "Things are bad out there," one official who asked not to be named told the Sun.

    The officials who spoke to the Sun sought to deflect some of the blame from the minister, saying that the management committee was directing the process and that members of the committee used the minister because of his perceived weakness.

    "(The chain of command was) the management team, followed by the minister," a senior official stressed.

    The education minister could not be reached and did not respond to the numerous voicemail messages left on his different machines. But Dr. Hilroy Thomas, who designed and drove the project to establish the college, lay the blame squarely at the feet of the ministry of education officials.

    "The people in education are too damn lazy," Thomas told the Sun in a telephone interview from his office in Miami, Florida.

    The director in the Continuing and Extended Education Department of St. Thomas University sought to justify the management committee's decision to report directly to the minister instead of the permanent secretary, by saying the officials of the ministry of education had refused to participate in the process.

    "The reason why we had to sidestep them is because they refused to make decisions when they had to make these decisions. They did everything possible not to get involved," Thomas claimed, adding that the permanent secretaries and the chief education officer had been given documents on the project in the fist year but they gave no feedback and "they kept on losing documents every time."

    "The permanent secretaries in (the ministry of) education were useless people, (therefore) whenever we came to bottlenecks, we went directly to the minister. (Education Minister) Skerritt has learned that change is necessary," Thomas added in his scathing and unrelenting attack on the public servants in the ministry of education.

    But various ministry of education officials denied Thomas' accusations while insisting that they were kept in the dark, especially after Skerritt took over the ministry of education from Herbert Sabroache, and after Dr. Donald Peters, another initiator of the project, was left out of the picture.

    "We facilitated (the process) as far as we could," one official maintained adding, "I feel very uncomfortable with the situation."

    "The problems that we have out there, everybody must work together," Felix Gregoire, permanent secretary in the ministry of education told the Sun in response to the Thomas allegations. "I fully support the college (and) my role is to make things happen."

    But Gregoire confirmed that after he returned to the ministry of education, he wrote Skerritt a five-page memo expressing concern about the lack of information in relation to the establishment of the college.

    "(With) the amount of work that has been done by the ministry of education, how can he say we are lazy?" an upset Gregoire asked in response to the Thomas charge.

    "It is clear that the information you want is not available," one irate official said regarding answers to the question raised about the process.

     "Nobody wants to talk about the college (and its problems), and the only person who would talk unleashed an attack on the ministry (of education)," the official added with a sense of sarcasm, while claiming that Thomas had a vendetta against the ministry of education.