Editorial | Restoring education

While we commend the education ministry’s various initiatives to deliver education to children in Jamaica’s storm-ravaged regions, the government perhaps needs a broader strategy to head-off a related, and potentially deep social problem caused by Hurricane Melissa: the likely permanent exodus of a large number of students from classrooms.

And to compound the problem, most of the absentees, according to the education minister, Dana Morris Dixon, are boys, who lag significantly behind girls in educational achievements, and are the source of much of the island’s anti-social behaviour, especially violent crime.

Melissa, a Category-5 hurricane, slammed into the western third of Jamaica in October, killing at least 45 people and cost, conservatively, US$8.6 billion in damage. Nearly 700 schools, most of them in the hard-hit parishes, were either damaged or destroyed, affecting tens of thousands of students, many whose homes were smashed by the storm, while their parents lost jobs and livelihoods.

It is to the credit of the authorities that last week the education minister, Dana Morris Dixon, could report that since the start of the January term, all of the island’s schools had re-opened and were delivering education in some form.

In some cases, destroyed school plants are unsalvageable. They may operate in tents or standby-facilities. Others hold classes in partially repaired buildings. Indeed, in many instances, according to Dr Morris Dixon, it will take up to a year-and-a-half for facilities to be repaired.

“For some schools it’s almost like a total rebuild,” the minister said.

In the meantime, in an attempt to get things back on track as best as possible, the education ministry has sent modified curriculum guides to affected schools, as well as delivered tens of thousands of literacy and numeracy preparatory materials and workbooks to students and teachers.

Additionally, nearly 700 students in hurricane-affected areas have been temporarily transferred to institutions in areas that were spared the impact of the hurricane, or not as badly damaged by Melissa.

Further, with UNICEF’S support, the education ministry has rolled out the School-in-a-Box system, a decentralised education response often used during disasters. Packed in a metal box, the kit, which contains school supplies, is a portable classroom that can be set up in emergency settings.

This, though, is the post-Melissa upside for education. A darker issue is what Dr Morris Dixon said in the Senate last week about school attendance.

In the education ministry’s Region 4, which covers the western parishes of James, Hanover and Westmoreland, which suffered severe devastation, only 72 per cent of students have turned up for classes in any of the offered modalities. In other words, the absentee rate is 28 per cent, meaning several thousand students are missing out on their education. It is not clear what the attendance rate has been in Region 5, which includes the parishes of Manchester and St Elizabeth, the latter being ground zero for the hurricane and the area of the greatest damage.

However, the absentee rate in the far west, Region 4, was 10 percentage points higher than the north-western parishes of St Ann and Trelawny (Region 3).

“It’s (school) absenteeism especially acute with our teenage boys,” Dr Morris Dixon said. “What happens is that they try and to go help their families. They see that their homes are destroyed and they want to help and so school for them is not important right now.”

According to Dr Morris Dixon, her ministry has been using schools’ guidance counsellors as well as civic and faith-based organisations, including churches, to “engage with families” to get children back into classrooms.

This post-Melissa absenteeism seems to mirror the situation at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when students were away from face-to-face classes for two years and teaching and learning was largely conducted online. At one point between 15 and 20 per cent of enrolled students weren’t turning up for classes and couldn’t be accounted for.

While those numbers fell, it has never been reported what proportion eventually returned or stayed away permanently.

As Minister Morris Dixon observed, on the evidence of what happened during the pandemic, the longer students stay away from the classroom, “it’s the higher the likelihood that they will not return”.

However, relatively high rates of absenteeism, or partial attendance, in Jamaican schools, is not related only to episodic events, such as the pandemic or hurricanes.

Indeed, in eastern Jamaica, the education ministry’s Region 2 (the parishes of Portland, St Thomas and St Mary) which was spared the brunt of Hurricane Melissa and had no or little infrastructural damage, the attendance rate for the school year has been 80 per cent. Stated another way, one in five students haven’t been turning up for school. And these are mainly boys, according to the minister.

This is the tip of a national crisis. While having schools guidance counsellors “going out into the communities to find the children” is the positive development, this newspaper doesn’t believe that this, in the circumstances, is sufficient.

The government and all stakeholders must craft a

far-more-robust programme to find these young people wherever they are, and in some cases perhaps design systems to deliver appropriate education to them in the environment in which they currently exist.