EDUCATION: British, U.S. Recruiters Return to Caribbean

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Bert Wilkinson

GEORGETOWN, Jan 19 2002 (IPS) - British and U.S. recruiters are returning to the Caribbean in search more of the region’s best teachers.

Instead of concentrating on Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad, as they did last summer, the recruiters have spread their net to include Guyana and several Eastern Caribbean islands.

From the recruiters’ point of view, the Caribbean teachers are ideal – because of their cultural background and because of their relatively low cost in salaries – to work in British and U.S. schools with large populations of immigrant children.

Some governments have blasted the headhunters for gouging their countries of large numbers of highly trained and experienced teachers, however, so this time around the recruiters say they have a different plan.

“Our aim is not to decimate any system in any country in the Caribbean,” said Steven Hinds, a Barbados-born official with the New York City Board of Education. Thus, for example, New York would take no more than 60 teachers from Jamaica, although it seeks to fill 600 vacancies with Caribbean recruits.

When Hinds and fellow recruiters visited Jamaica last week, he said, they received enough applications to meet their needs. They short-listed 200 and eventually will whittle them down to 60.

Officials said those not on the short list expressed bitterness and dejection because they had been anxious to leave a country they said is shortchanging teachers and nurses. Similar sentiments are expected to be manifest throughout the region.

Last summer, the New York board hired 600 teachers, most of them from Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad, amidst bitter controversy about pay, other conditions of employment, relocation and housing assistance, and visa treatment – all of which were better for teachers recruited from Canada and Europe than for those from the Caribbean.

There is no discernible difference in what the New York recruiters are offering this time around. Candidates have been told they will have to find their own housing and should carry enough money to finance their relocation.

Lance Baptiste, a spokesman for the Guyana Teachers Union (GTU) said the group has no plans to encourage or discourage teachers from leaving, given the abysmal salaries paid to its 8,000 members.

Baptiste, a former union president, said union efforts to win duty free car allowances for teachers and mortgages for houses have failed because no one takes them seriously.

“What we have seen is that when they send back their wealth, we see houses being built and cars being bought in a very short space of time. Teachers want to know that they have a decent living standard. What we have found as well is that many are not leaving only because of money, but because of how they are treated.”

He notes that the local training college turned out more than 300 teachers each year. “Yet, we can’t seem to close the gap because we are losing around that same number each year.”

A trained Guyanese teacher gets about 200 dollars per month, while a head teacher of the most highly rated high school earns about 520 dollars, one-sixth of what is on offer in New York.

So desperate were some Guyanese teachers to leave that about 50 of them paid their own expenses to travel to Trinidad to meet the New York officials. Several made the grade.

Several dozen local teachers also have accepted contracts in Haiti, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the English-speaking Caribbean.

Since 1997, the Botswana government has hired more than 300 Caribbean teachers, most Guyanese and Jamaicans, to help offset the loss of teachers to AIDS in the Southern African country.

But it is the recruitment by schools in Britain and the United States that is most troubling because recruiters go after the region’s most experienced teachers and have the resources to lure them away.

“That is going to be a big problem for us as there would be no experienced ones left to teach the younger ones and the younger ones would be always preparing to leave once they get some experience, ” said Baptiste.

Edward Greene, assistant secretary-general of the Caribbean Communty, said regional education officials later this month would discuss the outflow of teachers to the West.

Henry Jeffrey, Guyana’s information minister, said the situation is serious. “We will have to discuss it at the Community level to try and perhaps come up with some programme of action that may well lead us to have discources, whether it is on compensation or it is on an attempt to train teachers for export.”