Messing up education funding
FRIDAY’S GLEANER editorial, titled ‘The confusion of auxiliary fees’, speculates that the amounts collected by schools “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”.
No need to speculate, Madame Gleaner! Let’s take an actual case study, using publicly available figures shared among a school community recently, and look at it closely.
I want to look at the policy and its impact on a flagship institution, not at the minister and his made-for-lampooning antics. However, it is impossible to ignore what The Gleaner editorial obliquely references, that Immaculate Conception High School (ICHS) was one that the minister targeted last year with the incredibly harsh criticism that they were corrupt and extortionist.
The comment was “withdrawn”, but there was never an apology, and that kind of assault rather obviously leaves a festering burn.
So you don’t have to spell out the virtues of ICHS to most sensible Jamaicans. The place is legendary. It always ranks as one of the top-tier learning institutions in the country, and by almost any reckoning, it is among, if not the finest, girls’ high school in the Caribbean.
How much is an education at a school like ICHS worth? That is, of course, a nearly impossible question to answer, because the value of education, while not entirely unquantifiable, is in other respects not really measurable. But we know it’s worth a lot. A helluva lot.
Still, a better question might be: how much are people willing to pay to have their daughters educated at a school like ICHS? I bet there are very many parents who would pay a lot of money for that, and not surprisingly, the competition for the spaces at ICHS is intense.
However, the Government is involved, and politics reaches right down into the sinews of our every institution, and sadly, can poison any and everything.
Of course, the GOJ pays the salaries for most of the teachers that instruct the 1,759 students. On top of that, by ICHS’s own calculation, it cost $54,000 to deliver a year’s worth of instruction and a healthy school environment to a pupil. It adds up to just a shade under $95 million (1,759 x $54,000).
OVER 90 STUDENTS ON PATH
That’s the cost that I want to focus on and the one that the infamous “auxiliary fees” helps to cover.
Aside from paying the teachers, the Government provides ICHS with $17,000 for each student, which is, to be exact, $29,903,000. Plus ICHS has 90 students on PATH, so it gets an additional $2,000 for each of them, totalling $180,000. In total then, the school gets $30,083,000.
So, let’s review. Most salaries aside, it costs $95 million to run the school, while the Government provides $30 million, leaving a shortfall of about $65 million. In other words, the GOJ provides less than one-third of the needed amount. More on that to come.
How then will the school make up the difference? Well, of the 1,669 students who are not on PATH, the idea has been to charge them a small fee. Currently, that fee for students between grades 7 and 11 is $35,000 Jamaican dollars. The fee for grades 12-13 is $45,000.
Overseas readers will have noted that this J$35,000 is about US$330, meaning that it’s US$110 for each term of classes at this venerable institution.
Oh! I should add that in the real world the fee isn’t called a “tuition fee” or an “auxiliary fee” because those terms have been legislated out of existence. The $35k is broken up into a “Development Fee” and a “HSA fee”.
But this is more of a curiosity of recent political campaigns, where school administrations adjust their sails to the political winds and try to do what’s necessary to deliver education to their students. For all practical purposes there is a charge that anywhere else in the world would be called a tuition fee.
Along with the gymnastics about the name of that charge is the insistence that the charges are voluntary, and even (I believe it fair to say) discouraged, at least from the political platform.
As The Gleaner editorial also notes, this high metaphysical science of fees that exist, and don’t exist, makes the recently negotiated cancellation of those same fees for the children of civil servants especially bizarre.
Only a highly trained medieval scholastic could wrap his head around the existential status of this “fee that shall not be named tuition or auxiliary”.
Anyway, the key point I want to deliver is that EVEN IF ICHS were to have more than 90 per cent compliance with its Development and HSA fees, it would still have a shortfall of many millions of dollars. In more normal times, that gap was closed by donations from concerned parents and alumni and fundraising events like the annual fair and a lapathon.
Nothing too complicated so far, right? OK, so pay attention: last year ICHS had the lowest collection of fees ever. It followed the aforementioned political pronouncements that the fees were cancelled and abolished, or if not quite abolished, that payment is voluntary, and then that little part I mentioned about ICHS’s administrators being corrupt extortionists.
WHY SCHOOLS CUT BACK
Now, to belabour the obvious, when parents fail to pay, the school has to look at cutting back on the things that the fees pay for. Those things include: hiring additional teaching, administrative, lab and ancillary staff. As you might imagine, with the GOJ’s meagre allocations in the background, that supplement is crucially important. It’s what allows the school to keep a master-teacher on staff who would otherwise be sitting at home filing her nails because she’s reached the GOJ retirement age.
What about utility bills? Pretty basic. It would be hard to run a school without water and electricity. The fees pay for that. Then there’s security. And let’s not forget club and sport activities, including equipment, gears meets and entry fees.
Just the other day one of the groundskeepers at ICHS fell while trimming a tree: the fees pay for insurance so that they could call an ambulance and take the man to the hospital. Then there is student affairs and staff welfare, and transportation for clubs and sport activities and field trips.
Then there’s the repair and maintenance of the school plant and equipment. Basic. Critical. Yah! The fees pay for those things as well. And garbage collection. The fees pay for garbage collection too.
LOWEST YEAR OF COLLECTION
Now as I’ve mentioned, last year was the lowest year of collections in anyone’s memory, with grades 7 to 11 parents contributing less than 70 per cent of the US$110 per term for the ICHS education. How is it going this year? As at September 2018, collections for grades 7 to 11 stood at 32 per cent. You read that correctly.
Let’s be clear: it was a good thing when the Government increased the subvention per student to schools as part of its “no auxiliary fee” policy. It has benefited many non-traditional schools with greater GOJ largesse.
Sadly, the grandstanding also robbed them of the contributions that could have taken them even further ahead. In other words, while failing to lift the bottom to the extent that could have been done, we’ve also torn the top down a few pegs. A great opportunity was squandered.
So if the money had been increased without the political sting in the tail which gave with one hand then took away more with the other, there would be little grounds for complaint.
Instead, the net effect of this hamfisted policy and marble-in-mouth ministerial loose talk is to mobilise a screwed-up kind of equity whose signature is to dumb down the whole system.
Institutions like ICHS are a precious inheritance, and not one the GOJ paid for. It was inherited from the Church and the generations of parents and past students that have sustained this marvel. As I said, you don’t have to spell out the virtues of ICHS to any sensible Jamaican, but you may have to do it to the politicians.
For what it takes decades and even centuries to build can sometimes be torn down or ripped apart by one motivated man with a sledgehammer or an axe to grind.
The bottom line: we need to revisit educational funding with urgency, and with the political shibboleths and shenanigans left one-side.