Editorial | Beryl and education

One of the least noted but consequential impacts on Jamaica of Hurricane Beryl was its significant damage to schools.

Yet this requires major attention to ensure that the island does not risk a mini version of the COVID-19 pandemic - when schools were closed for an extended period - thus worsening Jamaica’s education deficit. It is important that schools are repaired sufficiently so that they accommodate students at the start of the new academic year in six weeks.

Up to last weekend, the authorities had not completed their estimates of damage done to school facilities. However, they had determined that 85 institutions, including some of the island’s most prominent high schools, including Munro College in the hard-hit parish of St Elizabeth in the southwest, fell in the category of severely damaged.

The projected bill for the repair of schools in this category was J$1.42 billion, or 53 per cent of the estimated J$2.7 billion, to fix the 309 institutions that, so far, have been assessed.

But as the education minister, Fayval Williams, pointed out, the final bill is likely to be much higher. The number of schools for which damage assessments have, thus far, been completed is less than a third of the schools in the public system. It is likely, too, that a significant portion of the island’s private, preparatory, and community-based basic/early childhood schools, especially in the southwest, will seek help from the Government to get their facilities up and running.

These demands will be on a long list of priorities facing the Government for post-hurricane reconstruction. For instance, with only an early partial assessment, the repair bill for damaged main roads is over J$10 billion. And the Government will have to spend on fixing other public infrastructure, including water systems operated by the state-owned National Water Commission.

Some critical economic sectors, including agriculture, are also looking to the Government to help with their recovery.

All of this, of course, excludes the normal demands on the Government, for which it already has insufficient resources. Put another way, the administration faces a fiscal dilemma that will require significant juggling while performing a delicate balancing act.

FISCAL SURPLUS TARGETS

This may require tempering its aggressive fiscal surplus targets for a few years, which translates to slowing, for a time, the pace at which it pays down the national debt to reach 60 per cent of GDP. Happily, it has facilities on standby arrangements from the International Monetary Fund and the Inter American Development Bank which can be tapped into, should the need arise. That is a matter for deep analysis by the fiscal administrators.

What is not, or ought not, to be up for debate is the urgency of getting the island’s schools repaired and in reasonable shape for the start of the new academic year.

Jamaica can ill afford otherwise. The island already faces an education crisis. Each year, around 40 per cent of 12- and 13- year-old students complete their primary education without full mastery of literacy and numeracy expected at their age and grade levels. Indeed, seven per cent of these students are at the beginner stage, rendering them totally incapable of absorbing secondary education without major remedial efforts.

What mostly happens with the majority of the deficient students is that they coast through high school, riding an escalator from grade to grade, without absorbing too much. They end high school not much better educated than when they started.

This systemic deficit shows in the fact that less than 30 per cent of Jamaican students who write the Caribbean Examinations Council’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams pass five subjects, including mathematics and English, in a single sitting. This data does not account for the fact that a large portion of the 11th-grade cohort is screened out of these and similar exams on the supposition that they would not make the grade.

CANNOT AFFORD

The point is that Jamaica cannot afford to have children out of classrooms for long periods as was forced to happen during the pandemic when schools were shuttered for the better part of two years.

In the first 19 months of the closure, the United Nations children organisation, UNICEF, estimated that Jamaican students lost 1.3 billion hours of school time.

While students were, ostensibly, carrying on with their classes online, large swathes never logged on. In many instances, they lacked connectivity either because broadband services did not exist in their communities or their parents could not afford to pay for it. Or they didn’t own devices with which to log in to classes.

The absence of classroom teaching and learning was problematic in other ways, too. At one stage, for example, the education ministry accounted for 120,000 students, or a fifth of all students enrolled in the public system at the primary and secondary levels.

Jamaican schools, post-Beryl, won’t face a problem anywhere near the magnitude of that caused by COVID-19. Nonetheless, we cannot afford to have any number of children out of classrooms for an extended period.

We support that urgent repair of schools, where that is what will get it done – including sole-source contracting. But that, we warn the administration, does not remove the obligation for transparency and accountability and ensuring that taxpayers get value for their money. The people at the education ministry must remember, too, that purchase orders are not contract documents.