Ads will not show evidence of teacher departures, says Harrison
Published:Wednesday | August 23, 2023 | 12:05 AMChristopher Thomas/Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
LA SONJA Harrison, the immediate past president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association [JTA], believes that Jamaica’s potential shortage of teachers ahead of the September school term will be seen in the number of vacancies for educators in the local school system.
In a media interview following Monday’s first session of the JTA’s 59th annual conference at the Royalton Negril Resorts and Spa in Westmoreland, Harrison said that the likely volume of teacher vacancies is not reflected in the number of vacancies which are publicly advertised.
“The days are coming where we will hear the principals and we will see the continued advertisements in our newspapers and also on our social media platforms. Primary schools do not necessarily have the resources to take out those big spreads in The Gleaner and other papers, so they tend to take out the little spots in the smaller sections, or most principals employ the use of social media and WhatsApp groupings so they can create their flyers and send them out, so we are not seeing the primary advertisements,” said Harrison.
“We are seeing predominantly the high school vacancies, and the vacancies are indicating to us that there will be a challenge. There were schools that completed our 2022-2023 academic year without their full staff complement, [and] those teachers were stretched beyond their borders, but they dug deep and they do what teachers do in this nation, continuing to give above and beyond service to the students,” Harrison added. “The teachers were leaving, but many of them were actually waiting to see what the compensation review would have looked like.”
LIVEABLE WAGE
The matter of teachers leaving Jamaica’s education sector has been a longstanding thorny issue, with the desire for better-paying jobs often being cited as a major reason for teachers migrating overseas. Last August, it was reported that 600 teachers would not return to the classroom for the September 2022 school term, with 13 per cent of those teachers being retired, 43 per cent having resigned, and 44 per cent on pre-approved leave.
On August 16 this year, Education Minister Fayval Williams told a post-Cabinet press briefing that there has been a 73 per cent decline in the number of teachers who have resigned from the public sector between January and September this year. However, critics argued that the data was incomplete or incorrect as, up to that point, August had not yet ended.
Harrison noted that with teachers uprooting themselves from Jamaica’s education system after several decades of service, the matter of teacher migration must not be ignored.
“Yesterday [Sunday] I got a call from someone asking to help with a transfer, because the school that their child is currently at, which is a traditional high school, changed one particular subject teacher four times in one year. So it makes no sense for us to skirt around the issue,” said Harrison.
“When you have a teacher who has given 25, 30, and 40 years of service deciding to uproot and to leave this country, it tells you that this person is nearing retirement and wants a home, wants a car, wants to complete their children’s tertiary education and to pay off some loans, and the teachers are deserving of that liveable wage. We continue for that quest, especially our classroom teachers.”