Crawford urges focus on five subjects for face-to-face classes

Opposition Senator Damion Crawford is recommending that secondary schools concentrate primarily on five subjects as students return to the classrooms during the pandemic with the need to observe social-distancing guidelines.

He said that if students want to do other subjects they should be engaged online.

And while supporting the Government’s move to extend secondary education for every student from five to seven years, Crawford indicated that the timing for its implementation was ill-advised.

He was making his contribution yesterday to the State of the Nation debate in the Upper House.

“We might better be able to facilitate face-to-face with five subjects and the other subjects can be online because the separation of students will take something additional than simply just saying they can be separated.”

In terms of the return to in-person learning, the senator questioned how social distance could be achieved in classrooms that previously accommodated 50 students.

“Maths and English for fourth and fifth form can be moved to Saturdays and Sundays,” he suggested.

For example, he said that on Saturdays and Sundays, students could benefit from four of five sessions of maths and English.

“Dem could have dem full week on a Saturday and full week on Sunday, relieving the classrooms for grades seven to nine,” he clarified.

With public transportation being one of the major factors that contribute to the spread of COVID-19, Crawford wants the Government to stagger the hours that schools begin in the morning to avoid children jockeying for space on buses with adults.

Start schools at 10:00 a.m.

He said that schools should begin at 10 a.m. and end at 3 p.m.

“If we move it to 10 a.m., some of the JUTC (Jamaica Urban Transit Company) buses can become school buses and those parishes that don’t have JUTC can contract some of the private buses that run on the route to become school buses,” he suggested.

By doing this, he said, “we might be able to separate our children sufficiently from our adults so that they can start to go to school. These are not things that are impossible to do, but these are not things that we have opened our minds to consider”.

He also wants the education ministry to partner with churches to use their facilities for learning.

“Parents could drop off their children right in their same community and the church would put volunteers around those children [and] that would become a space that the children can learn [in],” he said.

Addressing the issue of vaccine hesitancy, the Opposition senator chided Prime Minister Andrew Holness for characterising people as “fool-fool” and “false prophets” who refused to take COVID-19 vaccines.

“When the vaccine came through the natural scientists, we should have engaged the social scientists to find out how people would respond to the vaccine,” said Crawford.

He added that it would be an effort in futility to try and shame people out of vaccine hesitancy, arguing that there has never been another vaccine shrouded in as much controversy.

He said that a major negative was that the current vaccination drive had the least trusted people driving the conversation, noting that research has shown that politicians were among the least trusted people in the society.

“The last study says 8.4 per cent of people trust politicians. Why with a thing dependent on trust we are putting politicians at the forefront of the conversation? It is just not sensible to do,” he said.

edmond.campbell@gleanerjm.com