Bermuda Technical Institute old boy Stuart Hayward has called for the much-loved school to be reinstated on the disused Berkeley site.

?The Tech?, which would have been 50 years-old this year, is credited with reforming students cast aside by mainstream academia ? many of whom went on to enjoy successful careers and not just in the technical trades.

Speaking at a dinner for former alumni on Saturday Mr. Hayward said the Bermuda Technical Institute (BTI) was needed more than ever. He said: ?Now is the time to look to the re-launching of a technical school.

?I am hearing suggestions the now-empty site of the old Berkeley Institute be resurrected as a daytime technical school for boys and a night-time technical training centre open to the public.

?This would be an opportunity to set up the ideal conditions I identified for success.?

Mr. Hayward said the new school needed to repeat the formula of the old BTI which was sited on Robert?s Avenue before being phased out in the early 1970s.

The set-up include a fresh-start school for boys only with a high level of technical and academic training and staffed by teachers who treat students as humans with potential.

?The results can be overwhelmingly positive. So let?s make it happen. Our public school system is in crisis. That should cause our educators to welcome a model that has been proven to succeed.

?And, just in time, Education has a new Minister, one who knows from her own experience the value of alternatives to the existing system.?

He has suggested sending a delegation of Tech old boys to lobby new Education Minister Neletha Butterfield.

?They shut down the Technical Institute, but they can?t shut down. Our success so far is nothing compared with what we?re going to do.?

However the future of the old Berkeley site ? opposite the new multimillion dollar school which opens this term ? is in the hands of the Berkeley Educational Society has yet to make a decision.

Lovette Brangman, who chairs the subcommittee which vets applications, said as the site was zoned for education it would likely be let to somebody with an educational component. Asked about Mr. Hayward?s suggestion about reviving BTI she said: ?Doesn?t he know Bermuda College does all that now??

However she said BTI alumni could apply if they wished and a decision was likely to be made this year. But she said tenants would have to live with an old building which needed upgrading.

Mr. Hayward told guests at the BTI 50th Anniversary Gala Black tie/School Tie Banquet at the Fairmont Southampton that the Tech was closed because it became too successful.

He quoted former Bermuda College instructor Colin Palmer, in a research paper on the future of technical Education, as saying that: ?Bermuda was once one of the most technically competent countries to be found anywhere on this globe.

?With the departure in 1951 of the Royal Naval Dockyard (Bermuda) opened a technical school for the ?academically challenged? in 1956 and by 1972 it was producing some of the most proficiently educated graduates in Bermuda?s history. It was then that (the school) was suddenly closed.?

Mr. Hayward credited the BTI with helping him get back on the right track. ?Many of those early BTI entrants were boys who had been abandoned or rejected by the education system. Some were told they weren?t bright enough to go to high school; some that they wouldn?t amount to much. Some, like me, were misfits. Yet all of them, the losers, the failures, the misfits, the slow learners, as well as the stressed out ones, the ones too slick or too smart for the existing high schools ? all of them (all of us) blossomed at the Tech.

?Instead of closing it down, our leaders have asked: ?Just what was it that made the Tech succeed where other schools had failed or given up??. They could have used the Tech experience as a model through which to transform education throughout the island. They didn?t.?

But young men who attended that institution have gone on to become presidents of private firms, top civil servants, senior managers of banks, garages, Cable & Wireless, Belco, BTC as well as entrepreneurs who operate their own businesses, said Mr. Hayward.

He said while the efforts to include technical training at the Bermuda College are laudable, the programmes there are essentially add-ons to a student?s achievements in high school.

?We need to reach Bermuda?s males at a far earlier age, preferably as they are leaving elementary school. Why? ?Because it is in middle and high school that their interests are diverted, that their attention to humdrum academics flags, that their motivation dies.?