Ronald Thwaites | Plight of the hungry students

There is something exceptionally cruel about purposely or negligently keeping children hungry. We may not mean to, but that is exactly what our society is doing right now. And it is compounded by the fact that tens of thousands of our schoolchildren are hungry but expected to learn, be well behaved, and become model citizens. This is cruel folly!

The school I visited this week is a rural high school accommodating about 900 girls. Close to one-third of these young ladies are on PATH, receiving $150 per day for lunch. This can’t buy a patty now. Also, another 100 need social assistance but are excluded by the hopeless complexities and delays connected with application process. Once again, I plead with the Government to allow principals the discretion to place needy children on PATH.

Although many students travel from two parishes away each day, there is no breakfast for those who need it. How can we expect to transform education if we are ignoring the reality of hungry, young people?

The situation is made worse when face-to-face school is suspended. Even when virtual access is possible, if there is not enough proper food at home, the uptake of learning is weakened. Sending the nutrition products items to the school when the kids are not there is a waste.

With brittle family patterns and depleted parental incomes, a comprehensive school nutrition system for all, but especially the preschooolers, is essential.

DO BETTER

I heard stories of teachers who regularly have to use their own money just to ensure that their students have something to eat. God bless them, but that is not a sustainable solution. In a nation where there is no shortage of money, it is in everyone’s interest to do better than this.

It costs this high school just under $40,000 per pupil to cover running the establishment every year. But they receive only about half of that from the Government. So the administration has to depend on auxiliary fees of just over $10,000 per pupil, the contribution of which has dropped from 90 per cent previously to less than 40 per cent this year, courtesy of the recklessly false advice coming from the Cabinet that these fees have been abolished.

So the school fund rises consistently, to the detriment of teaching and learning attention: the canteen account is raided and when all of that falls short, enriching co-curricular activities are curtailed. The negative results will be felt for generations. This is not the way to finance transformational education.

While strict zoning of high-school placement would be very unpopular and counterproductive, it is equally imprudent for students from the upper Buff Bay Valley to have to travel to Highgate or Hector’s River. This causes chronic absenteeism, accentuates the nutrition deficit, increases vulnerability and must be rationalised.

The administration of this high school projects that 70 per cent of the students are connected to virtual instruction although for many of these, the programmes are unresponsive and the learning uneven. The principal assesses that there has been a 40 per cent loss of previous content over the eight-month suspension of classes. There is no settled plan as to how this will be made up.

This school could be on the cusp of being a really creditable institution. The academic results are reasonable, but the opportunities for improving the social capacities, the Christian values and the students’ powers of discernment are inadequate. The curriculum had best be altered to reflect this, and it must be the responsibility of an activist school board to institute changes.

Whose initiative will it be to adjust the priorities of education policy to move this school, and the many others like it, from mediocrity to excellence? I do not think any government has the capacity to do so, and so it stresses again the importance of churches, trusts, alumni and communities exerting greater responsibility for their schools.

TWO ELECTIONS

President-elect Joe Biden’s ascendancy is a triumph for decency over uncouthness, a vindication that truth is superior to lies, and a restored confidence that the struggle for equality of opportunity in the great United States is once more a possibility.

Similarly, Mark Golding’s election to lead the People’s National Party represents the prospect of a refreshing, energetic, mature approach to national development.

Recent governmental actions in the USA and locally have fallen so short of inclusive, sustainable expectations that the changes in leadership offer much hope.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.