By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Aug 29 2001 (IPS)

When schools reopen next week, more than 300 teachers -some of them, the country’s most experienced – will be absent, having taken new jobs in London and New York.

Their flight has averted a showdown between government and the largest teachers’ union over plans to trim the education workforce through lay-offs. But the ensuing brain drain has kindled new charges that local schools have been sacrificed to political expediency.

The government had planned a series of lay-offs to reduce the number of teachers countrywide and rein in the education budget. Had the teachers not been allowed to move to greener pastures in London and New York, chances were they would have been sent home without jobs. The Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) had decried the possible loss of jobs, and the option to go overseas seemed to head off a political confrontation.

The plan appears to have backfired, however. Whereas the lay-offs would have affected teachers with the lowest qualifications, experience and performance, the overseas recruiters have poached some of the country’s best teachers, say critics of the scheme.

Jamaica’s school system now faces a shortage of science and mathematics, language and Information Technology teachers, says Paul Adams, head of JTA which, with 20,000 members, is the island’s largest teachers’ union.

“It will take six years to replace a trained graduate and 20 years to get back that level of experience”, Adams says, referring to the length of service of many of the teachers who have opted to leave.

Burchell Whiteman, the education minister, is playing down the effects of the overseas recruitment drives he endorsed at the beginning of the summer. One of these was by the New York City Board of Education and the other by British education authorities.

“We must remain confident that the impact from the overseas recruitment will be less severe than is being suggested,” Whiteman said in a back-to-school message to the nation Sunday.

Eric Downie, a former JTA executive, counters that “our best teachers have left and there is a vacuum to fill.”

In the capital alone, two prominent schools – St. George’s College and Kingston College – reportedly have lost 34 and 20 teachers respectively. The exodus has not spared higher education: 27 lecturers reportedly have resigned from Jamaica’s oldest teacher training college, Mico.

To plug these and other gaps, the government plans to re-activate retired teachers, take on more part-time instructors, and deploy Cuban educators brought into the country under a bilateral exchange programme.

This is a reversal from last year, when the education ministry concluded, on the basis of a review of student-teacher ratios, that many high schools were overstaffed.

Much to JTA’s annoyance, the ministry then announced a rationalisation programme to cut and re-deploy the excess teachers. Some principals resorted to poaching students from nearby schools, breaching the student-teacher quota in their desperation to hang on to their specialist teachers. Others simply closed their skills training departments.

The teachers hired most recently would have been the first to go. They included science and mathematics staff and instructors in Information Technology, the latest addition to the curriculum.

The stage was set for a bruising fight with JTA, which questioned the government survey and offered to conduct its own. From a political perspective, the British and New York recruitment drives appeared ideally timed.

However, at their recent annual general meeting, the teachers, still bruised from a bitter wage dispute and the much-publicised lay-offs, pointed to the latest migration of teachers as proof that the education system is in deep trouble.

“The government has forced some of our best and brightest teachers to abandon everything and go to face an uncertain future,” says Cecelia Grant, a junior-school teacher.

Educators also question the government’s plans to make up for the current shortfall in teaching staff with re-activated retirees, part-timers, and Cubans. These measures are inadequate to compensate for the loss of top-grade teachers, they say.

A total of 38 Cuban teachers, 20 of them who have taught here before, will fill some of the places left vacant by the language, mathematics and science teachers, particularly in rural parishes, says Doreen Faulkner, the deputy education chief.

Since 1998, some 88 Cuban teachers have come to work here under a bilateral agreement that covers health, education, and sports.

The public education system lost many of its teachers to the lucrative private sector during the 1980s and early 1990s, forcing the government to hire part-timers to take up the slack. Many returned to the state-sponsored fold in 1995, as the economic downturn took its toll on private spending. The part-timers were then discarded. Now, they are in demand again.

For their part, the latest teachers who opted to leave the country say they are in search of better working conditions and more money. Downie, the former JTA executive, says many are simply fed up with the local system.

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