I opened my inbox about 20 minutes ago, and to my surprise there was an email from current Minister of Education Ms Rita Bourne-Gumbs.
To make a long story short, the Today Paper came out on Friday, with an article about Ms Bourne-Gumbs that outlined some of her goals and policies as the Education Minister.
The controversy in the article and its title, is that it appears to state that Ms Bourne-Gumbs intends to switch the language of education officially from Dutch to English, something which a vast majority of the St Maarten population are completely against.
Now, I didn’t write the article. I simply posted a photo of the article in the paper, along with a paragraph of my opinion of the matter, based on the article.
Now I will publish verbatim, her response to the article in the paper, and to the criticism that followed on Facebook. But my response to her is that if the newspaper printed errors, we based our opinion on what the newspaper stated or inferred, but the fault still lies solely with the newspaper – not with the views of the people who based their opinions on this newpaper, which politicians continue to use as a reliable, credible source- although we all know that that is far from the truth. Below is her response VERBATIM (Copied and Pasted directly) to what I posted to my Facebook, and to the St Maarteners who responded angrily over the weekend, to the article that was published in the paper:
Dear Ms. Roumou, I am responding to you via inbox because I was tagged in something you posted. Let me begin by saying that the article is not completely correct. It is a stronger Dutch curriculum in the English schools, because of the challenges the students face now. I will make a correction in the paper also. I take no offense to the various negative words and name calling under the post. I was just amazed that person who don’t even know me made such statements .If there is one thing Ms. Roumou that you should know about me, it is that I genuinely care about the students and their education. We have a long way to go. Now, you can choose to inform the many angry persons on who commented under the post or not. However, I will make the correction in a follow up statement. Also know you can always confirm any statements with me. Have a pleasant week further .
So above is Minister of Education, Rita Bourne-Gumbs response to the criticism.
Once Ms Bourne-Gumbs gets a correction from the newspaper, who’s article our opinions were based on, then I will also make note of that.
rita bourne gumbs minister of education st maarten