Mile Gully High on a mission to rescue underperforming boys
Published:Sunday | September 3, 2023 | 12:06 AMSashana Small - Sunday Gleaner Writer
Two-thirds of the students at Mile Gully High School in Manchester are boys, but its principal, Christopher Tyme, laments that they rarely feature among the top performers at the institution.
“We have seen the disparity between boys and girls progressively increasing each year,” he said, noting that 420 of the 660 students at the rural school are males.
According to Tyme, the boys who underperform at the institution sometimes enter the school unable to read.
“We have children who are non-starters – that's the title you give to a child who is going into infant, meaning they don't reach school level yet, but they have gone through the system,” he said.
To address this, he said the school launched a robust literacy programme last year, and, though the progress is slow, he remains optimistic about the results.
“For the last assessment in September last year, the average reading level was grade three, and we have moved that at the end of the academic year 2022/2023 to grade four-five,” Tyme shared with The Sunday Gleaner.
“Our goal is to at least have them at the grade-seven level by the time they reach Grade Nine. So, at least if they are unable to pursue the CSEC, then they will have the opportunity to pursue the HEART exam, City and Guilds exams, get certified in a skilled area and so forth, so that they can go out and do something productive in society.”
He said the programme is supported by two special educators on staff and the boys are pulled from classes for reading sessions.
More than $300,000 was spent on the initiative last year, and Tyme said, with the support of external partners, he expects that figure to increase for the upcoming school year.
Under his five-year leadership of the rural institution, he said, he has also embarked on re-engineering the curriculum by using the content as a vehicle to teach students in grades seven to nine valuable skills. Students in grades 10 and 11 are given a greater focus on content, but the principal said, by then, they would attain a greater level of independence.
“We have identified about seven skills – collaboration, critical thinking, literacy and numeracy, and a couple others that we want them to achieve. So every lesson plan now must have in it one or two skills that each lesson plan will be targeting for development among our children,” he said.
DEFICIT WITHIN SYSTEM
Tyme noted that the lack of basic reading skills at the high-school level among the boys is symptomatic of a deficit within the education system.
“If they are underperforming at infant and primary level, you won't expect anything different when it comes to the high-school level,” he reasoned.
“My conclusion is based on certain situations that I have observed with our boys. They have not been doing well from the very beginning of the education life. They are not used to success in education, so, after a while, they don't look to it for any success at all. So, the interest just wanes.”
Arguing that enough focus is not given to primary and early childhood education, Tyme is calling for routine psycho-educational testing of students at this level when signs are observed.
The principal is also of the view that students who underperform at the primary level should be kept back, but under very specific circumstances and after a greater effort is made to bring them up to standard.
“We're not based on level, or standards, or achievement or something like that. So a child passed the primary level, not competent in the primary level, and still come to high school,” he said.
“You don't want to have a bottleneck. What you need to do is make sure that, at each grade level, there are effective programmes in place so that most or all of your children can move to the next grade level. And if there are any one or two, then you can hold them back.”