Move on underpopulated schools

We agree with Ronald Thwaites, the education minister, that Jamaica should not linger on the matter of large schools, with few students consuming a disproportionate amount of scarce resources in the face of great need elsewhere.

So, while Mr Thwaites continues to talk with teachers and attempts to coax their union into embracing his proposed remedy, he should simultaneously be making the case to another set of critical constituents - parents, and Jamaicans, generally.

The issue at hand is the estimated 200 primary schools, with fewer than 100 students, employing upwards of 1,500 teachers and with teacher-to-student ratios as low as 1:12, or more than twice as good as the national average.

This is the result of changing demographics: schools situated in communities that no longer have the populations to support them.

Transferring the teachers to other institutions is, however, not so easy in Jamaica. Though paid by the Government, teachers in state-run schools are not employed to the central ministry, but to specific institutions. They can't, therefore, be routinely transferred. That has to be negotiated. There, apparently, has been some movement on this front, but the process has been slow.

Yet, as the education minister noted in Parliament this week, despite the $168,000 per student, or nearly twice the national average, it costs to run these underpopulated schools, their educational outcomes tend to be poor. The ministry can't pussyfoot any longer.

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