By Nadine Wilson Harris
Concerns are mounting about an increasing number of advertisements indicating clear vacancies at schools islandwide, as educators leave the country in droves to accept more lucrative opportunities overseas.
President of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), La Sonja Harrison, declared that the nation is in a crisis, which has been compounded by the fact that several countries are altering their matriculation processes to make it easier for local teachers to migrate.
Harrison has been warning the Jamaican government for months that teachers are dissatisfied and demotivated by the recently concluded compensation review process spearheaded by the Ministry of Finance and Planning. Despite several rounds of negotiations between the JTA and the government aimed at improving livable wages for educators, some of the nation’s teachers have come out feeling even more deflated with the final agreement. To date, there are still discrepancies and anomalies in salaries, further worsening the mood of educators.
“I don’t like saying, ‘I told you so’, however in my many utterances during the period of negotiation, I would have shared that this compensation review was critical to the retention of our teachers in the system,” Harrison told the Freedom Come Rain Newspaper.
“Many teachers were sitting, waiting, to see what it would have looked like for them financially before making their decisions to stay or to go,” she said.
Based on advertisements in local newspapers, several schools are now scrambling for teachers in varying subject areas. At the Clarendon-based Central High School, 20 posts were listed, and persons were advised to send their applications by June 23. Meanwhile, at Campion College, regarded as one of the top schools in the country, there was a need for 13 teachers for subjects such as Geography, Information Technology, Mathematics, Spanish, and Economics.
Source: CVMTV
“I am very concerned. I am very concerned about what the state of education will be like come September,” admitted Harrison.
“If we are not able to fill various vacancies in the schools across Jamaica, we will again be seeing large class sizes on the increase. Where it is that we have schools with a lot of new teachers, there are implications for especially our exit groups in high schools in terms of preparation for external examinations,” she noted.
The compensation review has left many of the senior teachers, especially, very demotivated and disenfranchised because, according to the JTA president, they are now taking home similar salaries to those with far less years of experience. She says it is important that the government does a recalculation and release the formulas for determining the salaries so teachers can know what they have gotten.
President of the Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools, Linvern Wright, believes the number of teachers fleeing the local education system this year is more than those that left last year, but he said this belief is solely based on optics. Some 248 public school teachers had resigned their posts up to the start of September last year, when school was scheduled to begin.
“They are looking at their own lives and thinking that they can make it better elsewhere and are going,” said Wright of the teachers who have migrated.
He pointed to the recent compensation exercise as one of the factors that pushed some of the teachers.
“We know how dissatisfied people are about not so much the size of the increase but the disparity in the size of the increase. Many people are upset about that, and the teachers felt that they were not properly dealt with. I think people are still concerned about their standard of living based on comparative standards elsewhere,” the principal noted.
Wright, who is the Principal of the William Knibb Memorial High School in Trelawny, noted that some subject areas have been more affected than others. He said there is an especially high demand for English and Industrial Arts teachers. At his school, between six and seven teachers have resigned overall.
“I am hearing there is more to go, but I have no confirmation,” he said.
Harrison said Mathematics and English teachers are being recruited at a rapid rate, but while they are the most marketable, all subject area teachers are being recruited to fill the increasing demand for teachers in more developed countries like the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. There are also challenges in finding teachers who studied humanities such as Geography, History and, to a lesser extent, Social Studies.
In the UK, a number of teachers are fleeing the classroom, creating a vacancy that, according to the Guardian, is at a record high, with more than 2,300 empty posts compared with 530 a decade earlier. Most states in the US are also dealing with an acute shortage of teachers, with states like Texas moving to four-day weeks due to a lack of staff, while other states are recruiting college students to instruct students.
In Jamaica, Harrison believes the government is not sufficiently addressing the issues that are causing teachers to leave in droves. In the aftermath of last year’s disclosure of the mass migration, education minister Fayval Williams announced that 964 newly trained teachers were available to the public school system, but the JTA president pointed out that there is no guarantee those leaving the teacher colleges each year will be heading into the classroom.
The migration of hundreds of teachers annually will likely impact children and those teachers who decide to stay.
“The teachers that are left here, they can look for increase number of sessions at the high school level when principals are unable to fill slots, and those at the primary level, larger class sizes,” Harrison said.
“Jamaica needs to pray; only God can help us,” said the senior educator.
Meanwhile, Wright encourages principals to put out their advertisements early. He said administrators should also collaborate to see how best they can help each other.
“Now is not the time to be too strict on every single thing. We might have to be a little innovative in how we do things,” he advised.