‘EDUCATION EMERGENCY’

DECLARING that Jamaica is facing an “education emergency”, president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) La Sonja Harrison is urging the Government to implement a five-year national learning recovery and acceleration plan to tackle the existing gaps in the sector. But Harrison is adamant that the five-year initiative must put educators at the forefront of the conversation. “If it is as educators, we are the first responders, we are the people on the ground, I am saying that there can be no conversation about how we go nationally without the teachers in a meaningful way. And I’m not talking about us, leaders of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, I’m talking about the people who are on the ground, the foot soldiers, and the people on whom you will depend [on] anyway to carry out whatever vision you have for education.

“Those persons need to be invited at the table from the beginning of the conversation, not at the tail end,” Harrison told the Jamaica Observer on Thursday following a meeting of the Rotary club of Kingston at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel. “We have TREND [Transforming Education for National Development], and we have ETOC [Education Transformation Oversight Committee], because they continue to update the nation quarterly concerning same. So ETOC will have some educators represented there, but is it reflective of the system, the people who work in the trenches of the system, and are they at the table for the conversation and posit the solutions that they would see ideal and realistic, in transforming the education system? ”Harrison questioned. In her presentation Harrison highlighted several disruptions faced by the education sector and argued that the urgency displayed by the Government in rebuilding structures and restoring operations has not been given…