Poverty keeps children at home
Published:Sunday | March 21, 2010 | 12:00 AM
Philip Hamilton, Sunday Gleaner Writer
ACUTE POVERTY and violence are denying students vital hours in the classroom. These age-old problems have not gone unnoticed by researchers and the Ministry of Education.
Over 20 per cent of the island's primary schools have attendance rates below the 90 per cent required by the ministry. Some drop to as low as 85 per cent.
Director of the School of Education at the University of the West Indies, Professor Zellyne Jennings-Craig, and her team of researchers, examined 100 primary schools across the island over 18 months in 2008. They collected information on the schools, as well as children, their parents, teachers, and the communities where the schools were located.
Unemployment, low literacy levels among parents and other members of the community, child labour, and the low value attached to education were identified as the main factors keeping children away from the classroom.
The team found that in rural enclaves, many parents struggled daily to send their kids to school, several barely able to eke out a living from their small farms.
Consequently, some children are not sent to school on Fridays widely regarded as a 'wasted day' when no learning takes place.
Many also attend school without having had breakfast, and it is not uncommon for children to be used by parents for reaping crops on these days, as well as for carrying goods to sell at the market.
Identifying the root causes, Jennings-Craig and her team established training programmes and workshops for the schools to mobilise the communities in identifying solutions to tackle the problems.
"Our next task was to help the schools form intervention man-agement committees which were largely community-based," said Jennings-Craig. " We had on the team somebody involved in social work, with a lot of experience with community-based organisa-tions, who was of great help in forming these committees."
Using the workshops organised by Jennings-Craig and her team, the committees developed various intervention strategies for imple-mentation by the schools.
Several income-generating projects were established by schools, most of which are agriculture-based and included poultry and pig rearing, vegetable gardens, a bakery, computers, and a music programme. Seed funding from the Ministry of Education of some $200,000 helped to kick-start the projects.
Fairfield Primary in Portland has a successful poultry-rearing project, which not only provides breakfast and lunches to impoverished students, but produce from the farm is sold to shops and jerk chicken vendors.
The school is now in the process of expanding its vegetable garden, and will shortly be setting up a pigsty with added help from community members.
While The Sunday Gleaner was unable to obtain data from the Ministry of Education to assess the programme's overall impact on improving school attendance, Jennings-Craig said preliminary reports from some institutions indicated marginal improvements.