Primary school students at Mtarfa have been temporarily moved to Msida because the building which housed their school has been deemed unsafe.

They will spend the rest of the scholastic year there and, we must admit, by Maltese standards Msida is not close to Mtarfa, and this in itself has already created a logistical problem. The parents of these children – as young as five – do not feel comfortable about the situation.

They have been promised that, at the start of the next scholastic year, the children will be moved closer to home, in Rabat, to occupy a school that will be vacated when Rabat children are relocated to a new school that is supposed to be completed before September.

The parents of the Mtarfa children do not understand why it had to come to this and, frankly speaking, neither do we. When we tried to seek answers from the ministry, all we got was a “please refer to statement already issued” reply, rather than reply to the questions we made, which was a haughty way to treat the issue, and also a sign of disrespect towards the Mtarfa residents.

The Mtarfa school was determined as being an unsafe structure years ago, when concrete boulders were put up against the side of the building to keep it together. So it has been known for quite some time that, sooner or later, the building would need to be abandoned. Yet, in all these years, the education authorities did not plan ahead.

Why wasn’t an alternative place, in Mtarfa, identified for a new school to be built there? The government prides itself with building new schools and modernising others. So why was not Mtarfa one of the localities that got its new primary school, given that the situation was getting worse year after year? Aren’t the children of Mtarfa entitled to the same benefit of having a school in their locality in the same way that other children all over Malta and Gozo are?

Secondly, parents of these Mtarfa children are right to complain that they are being treated like second class citizens. The children of Rabat will be moving into a new school in September; and the reason for this is that the premises they now occupy is not up to the same standard as their new school will be. So “if the school in Rabat is not good for Rabat children, why is it good for the children of Mtarfa”, was the way one parent put it.

Having said this, it is not a given that the new school in Rabat will be ready in time for the next scholastic year, so it is possible that Msida will continue to be a destination for Mtarfa children after the summer too.

There are places in Mtarfa where a new school could be built, the parents argued, and yet this option has been completely ignored by the education authorities.

While a relocation to Rabat in September is a better solution for the Mtarfa children, considering that the two localities are closer to each other than Msida is, it is hoped that the education authorities will work on providing a permanent school for the children of Mtarfa within the confines of the locality.

It is not too much to ask for.