The Tribune

By AVA TURNQUEST

Tribune Staff Reporter

aturnquest@tribunemedia.net

ALL PUBLIC schools in the country will be compliant with the new disabilities legislation by the two-year deadline, Education Minister Jerome Fitzgerald said yesterday.

Mr Fitzgerald said his ministry will work alongside the Ministry of Works to conduct an assessment of all schools before the year-end in a bid to include costs in next year’s national budget.

“It’s going to call for a lot of capital works obviously to get all of our facilities compliant with the legislation,” he said.

“Depending on the amount, we can do it over the period of two years. We have two years to be compliant and we will decide once we know what the cost of that is how we will schedule it over the next two years, but of course we intend to be compliant by the deadline and whatever the cost of that is we will have to relate that to the Ministry of Finance.”

The Persons with Disabilities - Equal Opportunities Bill 2014 – was passed in the House of Assembly earlier this month. The law mandates that any building open to the public must be adapted to accommodate persons with disabilities within two years.

The bill is expected to establish rights for the disabled, a National Commission, address issues of education, a development fund and exemptions and incentives for the disabled.

Mr Fitzgerald said: “We will send our team out along with the Ministry of Works to do an assessment of every single school, all 160 plus of them, to see what we need to do to bring them up. Some of them we won’t have an issue with, others will have to make minor adjustments, some may well be major but the key is when the deadline comes we will be compliant.”