Collaboration key to improve PATH for children, says labour minister

WESTERN BUREAU:

LABOUR AND Social Security Minister Pearnel Charles Jr is giving assurance that meetings will soon be held between his ministry and other government portfolio ministries to ensure that the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH) will properly benefit schoolchildren who are registered for its services.

Addressing Thursday’s PATH town hall at the Montego Bay Cultural Centre in Montego Bay, St James, Charles said that collaboration will be sought with the Ministry of Education (MOE), the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA), and the Ministry of Health (MOH) to streamline PATH.

“The suggestion about collaboration is heard, it is considered, and it is an echo of many of our guidance counsellors that are heard in Clarendon, Brown’s Town [in St Ann], and Portmore [in St Catherine]. What we intend to do is that after we finish the town halls, we’re going to have specific engagements with the MOE, and other ministry partners, to make sure that we design the options on what that collaboration can be, or the new dimension of that collaboration,” said Charles.

“Right now, several teachers are writing and recommending persons, and the experts at the Ministry of Labour take those recommendations and carry out their evaluations. Sometimes teachers may not get it right, because teachers may only see one angle of a student and think that student shouldn’t be on PATH, but the social worker is going to be doing a much more comprehensive investigation,” Charles added.

“Sometimes the teachers get it completely right, and we may not, so that is where the collaboration is important, to make sure that we are looking at all the different angles, including the student at the school and our investigations in the community, to come up with the best results and the best outcome.”

A recurring problem

He was responding to a concern raised during the forum’s question and answer session by Homer Davis, member of parliament for St James Southern, who complained that the issue of which children should or should not be beneficiaries of PATH is a recurring problem he has had to face.

“When I go into the primary schools, teachers will tell me that some of the children who are beneficiaries of PATH really don’t need it. As a result, there are students who are in need that, sometimes, they have to use their own lunch to subsidise those children,” said Davis.

“Shouldn’t there be some collaboration when the investigation is being done with the primary school principals and teachers to identify the children who are most needy? Because this is something that keeps coming up,” Davis added.

Charles also noted that part of the proposed collaboration will include an examination of the school feeding programme and how it can be bolstered so that students who rely on that programme for regular meals can benefit from it.

“We are taking an approach where it is one government, and so it is not a passing of the buck. We are actually a part of the review, and based on the stakeholder comments, we will be having greater collaboration with the MOE as well as the MOH and even the MOA. In some areas, we’re looking on even supplementing the school feeding through the agricultural produce, or the excess produce based on the area,” said Charles.

“It is a big issue, it is something we are keying down on, and even though this ministry does not have that responsibility when it hits the school, we consider it critical in terms of the review, because a review that does not take that into consideration would not be comprehensive,” he continued.

That comment was in response to a query by Alicia Archer, the board chairman of the Montego Bay High School for Girls, who cited her own school as an example regarding allocations to schools for their school feeding programmes.

“With the rising costs in food, we’re noticing that the allocation to our noble institution is still the same, so the board of management along with the school administration has had to apply strategies to ensure that our young ladies are fed. But we’re still struggling because there are other interim expenses at our school that do require the financial resources,” Archer pointed out.

Thursday’s meeting, which was held under the theme ‘On a PATH to Transformation’, was the fourth in a series of consultations allowing citizens the opportunity to share their experiences and suggestions for PATH’s improvement.

According to the Ministry of Labour’s data, as at August 2023, some 285,000 individual beneficiaries and 128,000 families are stated to have benefited from the programme. Of that number, 65 percent of PATH beneficiaries are children.

christopher.thomas@gleanerjm.com