Immaculate Prep under fire for blocking online classes

A group of 27 parents of grade one and kindergarten students at Immaculate Prep in Kingston have expressed outrage at the school board’s denial of their pleas for discounted fees for online classes and for barring children’s access to the Zoom portal for non-payment.

The standoff is a snapshot of a crisis rippling across the education sector as private schools grapple with falling enrolment and plunging compliance with tuition fees in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schools have been ordered closed since March 13 to curb the spread of the new coronavirus, forcing administrators and teachers to chart a fast learning curve with Internet-based interfacing. But with the Jamaican economy tanking with hundreds of thousands of jobs shed, parents’ pockets have tightened. Many of those with jobs have to juggle work with part-time teaching assistance.

That’s the rub of the unease at Immaculate.

One parent said that she has had to miss job opportunities to stay at home and assist her six-year-old child with accessing classes. She believes that Immaculate’s fees should be cut by at least 50 per cent.

Fees have been revised downwards to $106,000, 15 per cent lower than the original $125,500 per term.

“In our opinion, the child is at home, so your overheads at the school would have decreased,” said the parent, who requested anonymity for fear that she or her child might be victimised.

“... I should have seen this coming because the board is run by a certain people who you say have clout in Jamaica.”

Another parent who disclosed that her work hours have been reduced to three hours daily said that some parents refused to pay the proposed fee on principle, not because they couldn’t. She argued that children were not getting the same value from in-person classes.

“They said the teachers would be fully trained and they would buy a licence so that we only have one password. Having [an infant] putting upper case, lower case, and numbers for a password, somebody definitely has to be at home with them, guiding them,” the parent, who also asked that her name be withheld, said.

SCHOOL NOT BUDGING

The group of 27 dispatched a letter to board Chairman Ethan Sinclair, but the parents said that the school has not been amenable to budging.

“It’s like he’s saying, ‘They are just wasting their time sending me a letter because nothing will change’, so we decided not to pay the school fee,” a parent said.

Immaculate made good on its threat to bar students from accessing Zoom classes on Wednesday, parents told The Gleaner.

But Sinclair, an attorney-at-law, said that the school did not operate for profit and that 80 per cent of revenues were dedicated to paying staff. A further reduction in fees was not tenable, he said.

“We have sent more than one letter to them explaining just what the situation was and that there is no further discount that would have been possible for us to provide,” the board chairman said.

“That discount was only possible because teachers decided to take a 15 per cent cut in pay.”

Sinclair said that although children were not attending the physical plant, Immaculate still had overheads related to security and electricity.

danae.hyman@gleanerjm.com