Editorial | The Witter fix

Prime Minister Andrew Holness might have been too consumed with what Michael Witter calls “the tyranny of the immediate” to have noticed the economist’s recent prescription for how the PM might address the problem of violence that haunts Jamaica’s schools.

In that event, Mr Holness’ aides must ensure that Dr Witter’s article, reproduced in this newspaper on Saturday, is immediately presented to the prime minister, marked as urgent and demanding priority attention.

For, like Dr Witter, this newspaper believes that Jamaica faces no greater or potentially existential crisis than the societal ill health, of which the dysfunctional behaviour in classrooms and school campuses is a symptom. Addressing the problem in that environment is likely to be the most efficacious approach.

First, though, there has to be an acknowledgement of the depth and scale of the emergency as well as the Government’s willingness to bring new approaches to its solution – including allocating the necessary resources to the project and a JAMAL-style mobilisation of the society for the campaign.

LONG-STANDING ISSUE

Violence in schools, like the island’s high rate of homicide, has been a long-standing issue in Jamaica. But the problem appears to have grown worse since the post-COVID-19 return to classroom teaching and learning after a two-year hiatus. In recent weeks, a raft of fights and large-scale brawls between students have gone viral on social media. And in the last month, at least two students have been killed by fellow students on the compounds of their schools.

Dr Witter, a former lecturer of The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, commented on these developments in the face of a report by The Gleaner in which Angelica Dalrymple, the immediate past president of the Guidance Counsellors Association, lamented the collapse of students’ behaviour in Jamaica’s schools.

“COVID has turned some of our children into hopeless cases, and these cases have gone into schools,” Ms Dalrymple said in an interview. “... The country has not put out any effort to help. I am not talking with any water in my mouth when I say that the psychosocial intervention from the ministry has not reached a quarter of those who need it.”

She suggested that social interventions of the type that have been proposed by the Government were insufficient to address the scale of the problem, where “children (are) at the breaking point and seeing no hope”, and many teachers at a point where “they can’t … be bothered”.

SUMMON CABINET

“What I would do if I were the prime minister and just learning of the gravity of the situation in our schools,” Dr Witter said, “Instinctively, I would immediately summon my Cabinet to estimate the cost of providing the trained counsellors, not pastors with informal training, at best, in counselling, to schools, and we would mandate the minister of finance to identify the available resources before the meeting ended.”

Dr Witter conceded that such a prime ministerial directive would mean moving “resources from somewhere else that the Cabinet would henceforth deem to be a lower priority than the mental health of our children, at least for the foreseeable future”.

That approach is in line with this newspaper’s several calls over the past year and a half for the Government to “assemble a brigade of psychologists, schools guidance counsellors, social welfare officers, people trained in dispute resolution skills” – among other things – to address the behavioural crisis.

Both empirical data and anecdotal information underline this need for urgent and concentrated action.

More than a decade before the current crisis, eight in 10 students reported having witnessed violence at their schools, and three in 10 conceded having themselves used violence. And in 2019, on the eve of the pandemic, UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, reported that one in six Jamaican adolescents (16.4 per cent) – higher than the global average for the age cohort – suffered from a mental disorder. While the data was not broken down in age categories or types of disorders, a government report three years ago indicated that a quarter of Jamaicans will suffer from a mental illness sometime in their lifetime.

Of course, neither Dr Witter nor The Gleaner underestimates the complexity of the problem or supposes that its solution is of a single mode. What, however, is critical is appreciating the existential threat that it poses and that a fix demands national mobilisation, extraordinary leadership, and the will to expend political capital and take risks.

As Dr Witter said: “I would set the example of courageous leadership and summon similar leadership from my Cabinet and from all the sectors of Jamaican society, and particularly, the education sector.”