Teaching chose me, says new JTA president

La Sonja Harrison, newly installed president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), is now happy that she followed the advice of her husband to become a teacher, and not a police officer, a journalist or a flight attendant.

Harrison told The Gleaner that if you had asked her as a student in high school what she wanted to become, a teacher would have been far from her lips.

However, after marrying Ewan Harrison and giving birth to their first child, she was about to leave her job as a secretary when her husband encouraged her to go to teachers’ college, although her eyes were set on going to the Caribbean’s premier media training institution, CARIMAC.

“When I was going to high school, I can tell you I didn’t want to be a teacher, so I would say teaching chose me. But nonetheless, I have, at the suggestion of my husband, gone to teachers’ college … the rest is history,” Harrison explained.

TAKE A STAND

She pursued her bachelor’s degree at the Shortwood Teachers’ College, although The Mico University accepted her first.

After completing her bachelor’s, Harrison was first employed at Ardenne High School in September 2006, but only spent a month, after Holy Childhood High School called her with an offer of a full-time post.

All her years as a teacher were spent educating the young ladies at the Catholic institution, before “the Lord lifted” her in 2018 to become principal at a multi-grade school, St Faith’s Primary School in St Catherine, which has two classes per room.

As a high school teacher, she was always concerned about the nuisances affecting her colleagues and decided to take a stand whenever she could. She said running for the position of president was “answering a call” by educators around the island.

“All these years, while persons would have said that I would become president, it was not my foremost (ambition), it was not on my things-to-do list, it was not my agenda, but having represented the teachers’ interest on the conference floor and just serving my colleagues through the committees of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, and would have done that to the best of my ability, they would have reposed their confidence in me to lead them as their president,” Harrison told The Gleaner.

Now that she is in the driver’s seat of the JTA, Harrison feels honoured and has outlined several objectives for her tenure.

“I’m honoured. It’s an awesome undertaking which God has reposed in me to lead the teachers at this time where our nation is at a crossroads. We are celebrating Jamaica 60 and we must revisit. We need to look at, has education served us as we would have intended as an independent people? Have we sought vigorously to remove the tentacles of colonial legacies that have served to create a ‘have’ and ‘have-not’ society? How has education reinforced that? How has it liberated our people so that we can advance the mandate of this nation?” Harrison asked in reinforcing the issues that need to be addressed with the education sector.

“Jamaica is strategically positioned. No other nation is sought after as we are. No other island nation is on the tongue of persons worldwide. Wherever you go across the nook and cranny of this world, you can find a Jamaican and we have left an indelible mark, and more good than evil that would want to be reported in some quarters,” she said.

Harrison told The Gleaner that she is also on a mission “to advance things education”.

“We want to start a discourse about revisiting our philosophy; the philosophy that we have for education and how that has served us. Is it serving us well? And certainly all the other nuances [and] bureaucracies that continue to impede how it is that we carry out the business of education,” Harrison said.

During her reign, Harrison hopes to achieve constant and consistent representation and advocacy for the total well-being of teachers, and look at external and internal matters that prevent the advancement of teachers, like the Jamaica Teaching Council bill or the compensation review.

“It can’t be that we are only invited to the discourse when it is convenient or as an afterthought. We ought to lead the dialogue and we ought to be a part, because we are the persons on whom Government, our employers, depend to execute any vision, any philosophy, any project,” Harrison stressed.

She believes that overseas consultations are not needed for the local education sector. She is convinced that Jamaicans have the solutions for the problems that exist.

“The answers reside in us as a people. Yes, while we go and look at other people’s practices, we have what it takes within us. When we were creating our world-class athletes, we did not consult persons. When we were creating reggae music and all of that, we didn’t consult other persons and so we can create an education sector by Jamaicans for all Jamaican children that we can achieve that mandate and continue to sow good that Jamaica may, under God, increase in beauty, fellowship and prosperity, and play her part in advancing the welfare of the whole human race,” she said.

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com