The confusion of auxiliary fees

ADDRESSING THE first meeting of the parentteacher association for the new academic year last week, Walton Small, the principal of Wolmer’s Boys’ School, one of Jamaica’s top high schools, reeled off a host of improvements being undertaken.

Internet bandwidth has been enhanced more than threefold to ensure Wi-Fi accessibility across the compound as part of a move towards computer-aided teaching and learning. The idea, in time, is to have smart boards rather than chalkboards in classrooms. The school’s IT lab has been upgraded; more security cameras are being installed; televisions will soon be in the gazebo and canteen; and not too long from now, Wolmer’s will be off the electricity grid, drawing its power from solar panels.

Many more projects are in the pipeline, Dr Small said, but those will depend on funding, and the school isn’t swimming in cash. Then he pivoted to the related issue – an appeal to the parents of Wolmer’s students who are civil servants and have been asking for a refund of the auxiliary fees they had already paid.

“Civil servants who decide not to pay, if you can, please do,”Dr Small said.

The principal’s remarks largely echoed those of his bursar, Eaton Facey, at the orientation assembly for the new school year. Most of the projects, Mr Facey said, were contemplated before the Government’s announcement in August that civil servants, as part of their recent wage agreement, didn’t have to pay auxiliary fees. “We are in a place now where I don’t know what we can afford and what we can’t,” he lamented.

This uncertainty is not limited to Mr Facey and Wolmer’s Boys’ School. It is echoed in high schools across Jamaica and is part of a state policy muddle that, after more than two years, is still in need of clarity. The Government has to make up its mind whether auxiliary fees charged by schools represent compulsory or voluntary payments. If it is the latter, it must explain how the payments came to be considered part of the emoluments of public-sector workers, which is the logic of their exemption from it.

The auxiliary payments used to be called costsharing, and while the principle was that students whose parents couldn’t afford to pay wouldn’t be turned away from school, the expectation was that the monies would be collected. The institution treated it as debt, and for many schools, it accounted for up to 40 per cent of their budgets.

When the administration of which the current education minister, Ruel Reid, is a member came to office, it announced the abandonment of these payments on the basis, according to Mr Reid, that the collection was “a measly” 50 per cent of projections, and that the Government would increase the subventions to schools to close the gap. Parents could, voluntarily, continue to pay, but they wouldn’t be called ‘fees’. Mr Reid preferred ‘contributions’.

Indeed, the Government has substantially increased its allocation to schools. But given Jamaica’s fiscal constraints, it can’t afford the expenditure to deliver even first-rate education across the board. Traditional high schools, especially those with richer parents who are willing to contribute, do better.

It is not clear how much money schools now collect in auxiliary fees. But it is suggested that the amounts fell after the minister’s initial foray and his public spats with principals over the issue, especially in the lead-up to the start of the 2017-18 school year. Further confusion has been added with recent developments, including the disclosure that public-sector unions negotiated the exemptions as part of their recently concluded four-year wage package.

The obvious conclusion is that these fees, at least in the minds of officials at the finance ministry, are an obligation, despite last month’s insistence that they are voluntarily payments, for whose insistence he plans to sanction principals and school boards. Or, they might have been confused.

Indeed, Dean-Roy Bernard, an adviser to the education minister, had advised civil servants with children in high schools to take their work ID to the schools to exercise their no-payment option. “That is government policy and this ministry intends to give full support to it,”Dr Bernard said.