Two schools face hard lessons

As primary schools prepare for the resumption of face-to-face classes today, several long-standing issues continue to plague administrations.

Rennock Lodge All-Age School is one of the 376 institutions that have been cleared for reopening.

Acting principal of the Rockfort-based school, Tolima Anderson, expressed a sigh of relief about the return to normality as she and her teaching staff face a daunting challenge of closing the learning deficit. An estimated more than 50 per cent of her students did not have access to the Internet or computers at the start of the pandemic.

In the early weeks after school plants were ordered closed in March 2020, only four or five of the 33 students enrolled at Rennock Lodge had tablets, said the principal. The ministry reportedly issued 13 tablets, five of which were given to students on state welfare, with the remainder handed to others.

“The education officer told us that the Government said that we should take back the tablets from the children … because the tablets came for the PATH students, but we don’t have that much PATH students, so we gave it to other students. That is common sense,” Anderson told The Gleaner on Sunday.

PATH is the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education.

It took the intervention of the school board, said Anderson, to prevent the recovery of the devices by the ministry.

Attempts by The Gleaner to reach Education Minister Fayval Williams, acting Permanent Secretary Maureen Dwyer, and Chief Education Officer Kasan Troupe for comment on Sunday were unsuccessful.

That tug of war over tablets is just one of the bits of bureaucracy that put educators on a sharp and bumpy learning curve during the 20 months of COVID-19 here.

Despite the challenges, Rennock Lodge has seen enrolments increase to nearly 100. The school has a capacity for 175 students.

That change in fortunes has been credited to the improved performance of sixth-graders in the Primary Exit Profile external exams that channel students into secondary schools.

But Anderson is also facing her own personal hurdle.

A teacher at Rennock Lodge for 17 years, she has been acting as principal since the post became vacant in 2016. Since being interviewed in June 2019, Anderson said she has been waiting for her appointment to be ratified.

“Each time my documents go up, they come back down. One of the times, I went to the ministry and the documents for the school are missing …. I went to the National Council for Education three times and there were no documents for the school,” Anderson said on Sunday.

Those concerns could not be addressed because the hierarchy of the education ministry could not be reached.

Weighing in on the matter, former Minister of Education, the Reverend Ronald Thwaites, said that the entire public service was in need of urgent reform. In his opinion, administrators should not be acting as principals for more than three months, except in extenuating circumstances.

“It is unacceptable. You are denying that principal the security that is required. Usually that takes place because of the inattention of the board or some failure in the bureaucracy of the ministry, and it is unfair,” he said.

“… We need to get serious about productivity in all positions and the proper appointment and the proper accountability of every person who is employed by the taxpayer.”

Meanwhile, Jacks Hill Primary and Infant is another Corporate Area school that has its share of challenges.

Principal Duane Forbes disclosed that enrolment at the multigrade school has slipped from 52 to 48 students over the course of the pandemic.

However, average daily attendance online has been 32 to 34 students. That means that around a third of the students regularly miss classes, a troubling metric when extrapolated across many of Jamaica’s schools.

The current capacity of Jacks Hill Primary is 80 students in the new era of social-distancing recalculation. The resumption of face-to-face classes is expected to be a fillip for learning at schools like Jacks Hill.

The fall in enrolment has been linked to realignment with parents’ workplace locations and a persistent stigma over academic performance.

Thwaites believes that the most important priority of schools is to assess returning students’ intellectual and emotional condition quickly.

“It is illusory and criminal, in my view, for us to simply reopen a school and not recognise the very delicate situation in which all children are going to be in, having been out of that school environment for that long,” said Thwaites.