Parents not happy with slow registrations

PARENTS of students attending Kelua Teachers’ College in Mt Hagen are not happy with the slow progress of registrations.
Parents told The National yesterday that everyone should be given a chance to be educated and what was being done to delay the registration process was not right.
Parents’ spokesperson Wama Puri, of Mt Hagen, said that his daughter would be completing her diploma in teaching this year and she needed to graduate and register as a teacher.
He said parents were the people who suffered because they struggled to pay the fees for their children.
“The Education Department has passed the buck to the Office of Higher Education to be in charge of college registration,” Puri claimed.
“So, we the parents are lost now and we are calling on Education Minister Nick Kuman, Minister for Higher Education, Research Science and Technology Pila Niningi and the college management to give us a clear explanation,” Puri said.
He said all they wanted was for the students to graduate.
College chairman and founder Thomas Kopal, when contacted, said all the required information to have the institution registered was screened by the Education Department’s Implementation Monitoring Group (IMG) and was then passed to the Top Management Team (TMT) and finally to the National Education Board (NEB) for approval.
Kopal said that as far as he knew, there were four teachers’ colleges in the country – Kelua Teachers’ College (KTC) in Mt Hagen, Bismarck in Rabaul, Goroka in Eastern Highlands and Kumul in Port Moresby and they had met the required standards to be registered and recognised by the government.
Kopal said more than 100 students from last year and this year were waiting to be graduated and the registration should be fast-tracked.