JTA should take leadership

LEIGHTON JOHNSON has added a critical voice to calls for the Government to launch a national assault against the deepening problem of violence in schools and among students.

However, Mr Johnson and the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), which he leads, should go further. They should grasp and take ownership of the campaign, including telling the Government, in specific detail, the tools needed by their members, at the level of schools, to give the campaign a reasonable chance of success.

The JTA should also take on the role of honest broker between the Government and the political Opposition in the best interest of students – and Jamaica’s development.

While the problem of schools/student is not new, in recent weeks Jamaica has been seemingly inundated with physical altercations between students on campuses and other public spaces. Two children have been killed by fellow students on school compounds and several viral social media images of public brawls between rival groups out there. In one case, student leaders of two high schools, whose colleagues engaged in fights, made public pledges of peace.

RENEWED CALLS

These developments have triggered renewed calls, including Sunday’s intervention by Mr Johnson, for the Government to do more to stem the problem, which the teachers” union president warned had “the potential to cripple our nation”.

The education ministry, he said, should give schools more money to hire“additional guidance counsellors and social workers that are required to implement and undertake the home-based and community-based interventions”.

“...Violence, whether in schools or within our communities, poses a significant barrier to learning and to national development,” Mr Johnson told a church service to mark the start of the annual Teachers’ Week. “It instils fear, disrupts classrooms; it hinders the academic progress of our students and stagnates growth.”

Mr Johnson’s call for a school- and student-centred, yet broad, multisectoral intervention has echoes of the strategy proposed by this newspaper and others in the face of an upsurge of in-class aggression and campus violence when students returned to physical classes in 2022, after a two-year hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are also apparent overlaps between the JTA’s ideas, Opposition’s suggestions for addressing the crisis, and solutions the education minister, Fayval Williams, says are already being implemented.

What is absent, it seems, is a coordinated, genuinely national and stakeholder-engaged effort that ensures the best ideas have a real shot of being effected, no matter the political stripe of their origin. The crisis facing the Jamaican society and its students demand it.

Indeed, more than 1,000 Jamaicans are murdered annually, and the island’s homicide rate hovers at around 50 per 100,000, exacerbating the social instability that Mr Johnson points out as being bad for teaching and learning.

These stresses tell on the island’s children. Eight out of 10 say they have witnessed violence in their communities; six out of 10 have encountered it in schools; and three in 10 admit to themselves having used violence against others in school.

MENTAL DISORDER

Additionally, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, reported that one in six Jamaican adolescents (16.4 per cent) suffered from a mental disorder. That problem could well have been exacerbated by the pandemic and other problems in the society.

It is against this backdrop that 14 months ago, The Gleaner called for the Government to “assemble a brigade of psychologists, psychologists, schools guidance counsellors, social welfare officers, people trained in dispute resolution skills, as well as other volunteers, to support teachers in an assault on the behavioural problems of students”.

Separately, Damien Crawford, the Opposition’s shadow education minister, called for, among other things, guidance counsellor-headed departments of socialisation in all schools, for the creation of a department of volunteerism in the education ministry to coordinate the efforts of Jamaicans who want to contribute to this national mobilisation against the problem.

Claiming that the Government was neither doing sufficient nor being creative enough in dealing with the crisis, Mr Crawford last week reissued a 20-point plan for addressing the issue and Education Minister Williams to discuss its implementation. It is not clear whether the minister accepted the invitation, but she said that several of those, and other initiatives, were already being implemented and in some cases just needed scaling up.

This is where the JTA can assume a significant role. When competitive politics is in play, even the same statements, built on the same logic, almost inevitably becomes suffused with, and lost in, a partisan babel. Common interests get lost, or become secondary to posture.

As an honest broker, the JTA can keep all parties to a common language and focused on the common cause. Through its reach in schools, it can also more accurately give the Government an unvarnished assessment of what is really needed to get the job done.

It may also be to do something else that has not been seriously attempted or achieved in Jamaica for nearly half a century: the mass mobilisation of the society around a single purpose - as was done in the JAMAL movement’s promotion of adult education.

That should be the pillar of the campaign against violence in schools and among children, and of the broader education transformation project.