KINGSTON, Jamaica. A children’s advocacy body has taken issue with Prime Minister Andrew Holness after he suggested that pupils still being taught under trees, nearly a year after Hurricane Melissa, were learning closer to nature.
The Prime Minister made the remark on Tuesday at the launch of the Jamaica Reconstruction and Resilience Oversight Committee, the new body charged with overseeing the country’s recovery from the Category 5 storm. He had been responding to press coverage of children in western Jamaica attending lessons outdoors because their school buildings have not been repaired.
He told the launch that classrooms in many schools are unbearably hot, that outdoor lessons had been his own favourite time as a schoolboy, and that the country should not look down on children learning in cooler settings. He added that the government’s job was not to explain away shortcomings but to fix them and speed up delivery.
The Fi Wi Children Foundation responded a day later. It said the remarks risked romanticising conditions that children should not be expected to accept, particularly where pupils are in temporary facilities, near construction, or in settings that may not meet basic standards for safe learning. Circumstances forced on children, the group argued, should never be presented as an educational advantage.
The foundation asked the government to publish clear timelines for the completion of school repairs, to explain what safeguards protect children attending schools where building work is under way, and to let children’s rights rather than public relations guide the recovery.
The Prime Minister has himself conceded that the pace of repairs has disappointed him. He told the same launch that public servants fear being written up by the auditor general or hauled before the Public Administration and Appropriations Committee, and so move no faster than procedure allows, while families keep waiting. He said more than 300 schools are on the repair roster and that a number are being rebuilt rather than patched.
Anger over conditions has been sharpest in St Elizabeth and Westmoreland, where severe storm damage remains unaddressed close to a year after Melissa made landfall.
LRTVS News Desk
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