Parent place controversy at Mt Salem ZOSO

WESTERN BUREAU:

HEAD OF the National Parenting Support Commission (NPSC) is denying claims made by the leadership of the Mt Salem Community Development Committee (CDC) Benevolent Society that the Emanuel Chapel Church-based parent place has failed to create any meaningful impact among parents in their community.

“We have persons who are part of the CDC who we trained as mentors down there, and who actually guided our roving parenting programme in December, so that’s not true,” said Kaysia Kerr, chief executive officer of the NPSC, an agency of the Ministry of Education and Youth.

She was responding on Monday to claims made by Winsome Barnes, president of the Mt Salem CDC, that the parent place initiative that was launched in 2018 as part of the social intervention projects, under the ongoing zone of special operations (ZOSO), has not taken root, and has therefore failed to meet its intended mandate.

“That parent place was more concerned about helping children for homework support, and I have deployed staff to run parent education classes,” Kerr told The Gleaner.

“I know the Rural Agricultural Development Authority (RADA) had come in through the support of the facilitator there to run programmes related to backyard gardening and how to prepare nutritious meals.”

The CEO argued that the NPSC’s responsibility, where parenting places are concerned, is not to physically run these facilities, but to monitor and evaluate their programmes periodically.

“The day-to-day operations of the parent place resides with the facilitators. Our responsibility is to ‘quality assure’ the programmes that are being run there.

“At no point in the parent place manual does it say that the national parenting commission will give staff to any place; that’s not how it works,” Kerr charged.

In 2017, under the law reform for ZOSO’s Special Security and Community Development Measures Act, Mt Salem was declared the first ZOSO, where, according to Kerr, parents were experiencing several issues, including their inability to help their children with schoolwork.

“When I went into that ZOSO, the number one support that parents asked for was support for homework. Many of them had issues with literacy, some don’t understand the dictates of the National Standards Curriculum. Therefore, the impetus for opening it was to support homework and literacy building,” Kerr explained, while noting that the other activities would have been secondary, because all parent places don’t offer all the products.

The NPSC has also said it has trained several mentors from the community to support the parenting skills that are needed.

“There are two cohorts of mentors that were trained. One cohort resides in Mt Salem, who have been working. So when persons are talking, they must talk from a place of knowledge; you don’t just go and spit fire and don’t know what you talking about,” Kerr stated.

CRITICAL SUPPORT

Barnes, the CDC president, has argued that “it (parent place) never started because people go there and nobody is there”.

“How can I refer somebody to something where there is no staffing,” she questioned in a Gleaner interview.

Parents’ places are established by the Ministry of Education, in partnership with schools, community-based groups and others, including faith-based institutions, to provide critical support and guidance to parents as they undertake the increasingly difficult task of child-rearing.

“They are considered one-stop shops, and provide a comfortable and attractive place for parents to go for information, courses, workshops, mentorship, recreational activities, income-support training and, when possible, diagnostic and therapeutic services.

In these facilities, part of the concept is for parents to be given the opportunity to learn about their responsibilities under the law and the consequences of not fulfilling them, particularly as it relates to child abuse or neglect.

“We need stronger parenting support because we have a lot of young parents,” Barnes said, as she appealed for help. “That is one of the many issues why we are having a lot of these crimes, quarrels and disagreements among each other.

“We need restorative justice to prevent disagreements from escalating into confrontations and deaths,” she said, while sharing that many of the young ladies in the community graduated from school without any form of certification or qualification.

Reverend Marc Mullings, pastor of the Emanuel Chapel, has sided with the NPSC, arguing that to say that the parent place has not started and has not worked is far from the truth. However, he admitted that some of its programmes have not been carried out, as trained facilitators were no longer available.

“One of the challenges we have (and) why the parent place is not operating now, is that the key persons who were there to man it have moved out of the community, and at least one has migrated overseas since that time,” Mullings said.

“The parent place is not functioning as it was established to do at this point in time,” he told The Gleaner, noting that it was further compounded by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said while most of the church’s activities are yet to restart after the fourth wave of the pandemic, he will have to revisit the activities of the parent place to bring its operations in line with that of the church’s to meet the needs of the community.