Student athletes flee crime-plagued MoBay
Published:Friday | March 29, 2019 | 12:00 AMDania Bogle/Gleaner Writer
Once known as the ‘Friendly City’, Montego Bay is now in an unenviable position as the tourism capital tries to wrest itself from the murderous clutches of a crime monster gripping St James.
It is not a reality that escapes the schools in the northwestern parish, and according to Herbert Morrison Technical High School headmaster Paul Adams, several of his school’s top athletes are fleeing the parish.
“The crime and violence in Montego Bay has negatively affected our programme significantly. We have lost a lot of our talent to Kingston schools,” Adams, a former Jamaica Teachers’ Association president, told The Gleaner.
No more poignant is that reality than this week as schools compete at the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association/GraceKennedy Boys and Girls’ Athletics Championships.
The school is located in the relatively safe Bogue area, but Adams says that many students come from surrounding communities entrenched in instability.
Adams, who once served as vice-principal at St Elizabeth Technical High School, told The Gleaner that he understood the importance of having a house at which students could stay for camps and training during the sports season, but parents were just not willing to do this at his school because of the crime in the city.
“No parent would allow it. We could not take that risk, and it is really a risk,” he said.
It means that the school has lost out on a lot of potentially talented athletes whose parents prefer to send them to school in a more secure environment.
The decline is evident. The school finished in the top 10 in both the boys and girls sections at Champs in 2006 and 2007. A decade later, in 2017, the school could only muster 21st and 23rd place in the boys and girls’ rankings, respectively.
“A lot of the athletes we would get into our school, they go to Kingston, where they can board and be properly supervised,” he said.
Adams said that even training for sporting events has been a risky venture for athletes.
“I don’t think the society understands,” he told The Gleaner. “It’s a real tragedy when students can’t leave their homes.”