Elletson Primary fights to survive in shadow of gang wars

Elletson Primary and Infant School in East Kingston has long been affected by gang violence, with the toll becoming increasingly evident in its declining enrolment numbers. The impact is so severe that administrators often find themselves waiting for police approval before they can safely open or dismiss students as gunmen run rampant outside.

The reality is very scary and traumatising for the students, staff, and visitors. It was last week pinpointed as the main reason behind the school’s sharp decline in population size, placing it among the primary schools with the lowest enrolment islandwide.

On paper – and inclusive of the Randolf Lopez School of Hope Unit with 23 students located on the compound – Elletson Primary and Infant can accommodate 650 pupils. However, only 93 students are currently enrolled.

Principal Debbie Meek began working at the school in 2020, when there were about 200 students across multiple grades. Since then, she has witnessed a steady decline in enrolment as violence in the surrounding community has escalated.

“Coming here, you would have seen that outside is like a ghost town. It is because people have been murdered every so often, and a lot of parents have decided to move out of the community and take their children with them. That is the main factor,” Meek told The Sunday Gleaner last week.

“Many people are just afraid to send their children up the lane. They are afraid of the sporadic gunfire and they don’t know what is going to happen,” she continued, adding that the community dump near the school’s entrance is not only an eyesore but also a contributing factor to the exodus.

Meek said gunmen in the area are indifferent to the presence of the school, noting that a Peace Day devotion in March this year and Labour Day activities later in May came to a grinding halt as gangsters engaged in open battles near the school.

“It is so bad that it is almost as if the students have become immune to the gunshots. It’s like nothing to them,” offered guidance counsellor Abigail Clarke. “If they see something happening, they are quicker to move toward the gate than run from it.”

Clarke admitted that it’s a shock for her, as a newcomer to the school, to see students reacting this way – running towards the sound of gunfire.

“But then we try to find out what’s going on in their heads and we understand that this is what goes on for them on a regular weekend. You may find a few who are afraid, but the majority are not, even though they are still traumatised,” she said.

On countless occasions in recent months, teachers have been forced to either scamper to cover with their students or lay flat on the ground, clutching some who are crying as gunshots ring out. The school has had to implement outreach interventions for its most affected pupils.

“There are some days that I have to call the police to find out if it is okay to come out,” said Principal Meek, recalling Labour Day, when a woman was seen running with what appeared to be a bullet wound after shots rang out near the school.

The woman was rushed to hospital and the Labour Day project was abandoned right away, she said.

“So you don’t know when something is going to happen.”

Despite the chaos, Meek emphasised that Elletson Primary and Infant is one of the few remaining pillars of stability in the community. If the school were to close, it could be a death blow to an already struggling area, which has seen its share of violence and tragedy.

Clarke noted that many parents view Elletson as a school for special education and once their struggling children improve academically, they often move them to other institutions nearby. Others are hesitant to cross turf boundaries and, though they send their children to school, they avoid parent-teacher meetings and school enrichment and parental support initiatives.

Meanwhile, Garfield McDonald, principal of New Day Primary School, located in Grants Pen, St Andrew, pointed out that his school’s decline in enrolment is not due to crime despite also being in a violence-prone community.

The Ministry of Education told The Sunday Gleaner that New Day has a capacity of 1,000, but had only 222 students enrolled in the last academic year.

McDonald explained that the 1,000-capacity threshold is a reflection of the days when New Day was operating as a primary and junior high school.

The decline in enrolment, he said, is more due to broader demographic trends, such as lower local birth rates and a population shift from the Corporate Area to new housing developments in St Catherine and Clarendon.

McDonald listed at least nine primary schools in New Day’s immediate locale, some of which have better resources and more attractive extracurricular programmes than can be offered at his school.

“The Government has now switched its focus from all-age and junior high schools to having more primary and secondary schools. ... So as a result, the school now has to recalibrate how it sells and promotes itself, and that will take some amount of time to see the numbers going up,” he said. “But we will never be able to reach that number of our full capacity. Maybe we’ll never even get to 50 per cent because remember there is a national population drift.”

He said that while some primary schools are fighting to maintain enrolment, schools in Half-Way Tree – the St Andrew capital – and some in “Portmore (St Catherine) going back into Clarendon, many of those schools are bursting at the seams”.

corey.robinson@gleanerjm.com