With more than 6,000 students across western Jamaica still facing major disruptions after Hurricane Melissa, a growing partnership between the education ministry and community leaders aims to prevent further learning loss. Opposition MP Damion Crawford’s host-school and foster-family initiative—which pairs displaced students with schools and supportive homes in St Catherine—has earned praise for offering academic stability and psychosocial care.

Adopt Crawford’s template

Jamaica Gleaner/3 Dec 2025

EDUCATION MINISTER Dr Dana Morris Dixon should formally embrace, and expand, the initiative of the opposition parliamentarian, Damion Crawford, of pairing students in parishes badly hit by Hurricane Melissa with host schools and foster families in his St Catherine North West constituency.

If there are political sensitivities about the authorship of the project, Dr Morris Dixon, can promote the initiative as an extension of her own host schools programme.

She can as well note the endorsement by, and involvement of, one of her ministry-supported quality education circle (QEC) groups in Mr Crawford’s initiative. QECS are groups of schools in a geographic area that work together to enhance educational outcomes.

The most important consideration, however, must be to limit the learning loss of, and provide psychosocial support to, several thousand students whose schools and/or homes were damaged or destroyed by the hurricane, and whose lives have been otherwise upended.

When Melissa, a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of 185 miles per hour, barrelled across western Jamaica on October 28, it killed at least 45 people and damaged or destroyed over 130,000 homes. More than 900,000, or over 30 per cent of Jamaica’s population, was impacted.

By the education ministry’s count, over 600 government educational institutions sustained some form of damage. Three-quarters of those (450), or more than 45 per cent of all government schools, were in the worst-affected southwestern and western parishes.

A month after the hurricane, several of these schools remain closed, their condition too bad for quick repairs. Some may never reopen, given the state of their destruction.

HOST-SCHOOL MODALITY

Late last month, Dr Morris Dixon announced a hostschool programme, where students whose schools have been unable to reopen are to be temporarily assigned to other institutions, while still formally registered with their old ones.

“To ensure learning does not come to a halt for the thousands of children in the severely damaged schools, we have activated a host-school modality,”the minister said.“this is a temporary arrangement, where a student from a non-operational school continues learning in another institution for a defined period of time.”

According Dr Morris Dixon, these temporarily transferred students will be afforded the requisite social support.

Mr Crawford’s initiative builds substantially on this idea.

What the Opposition MP has done is to get the principals and governors of three high and 12 primary schools in his constituency to find spaces in their schools for 200 students from five western parishes for at least six months, between January and June, 2026.

Additionally, he co-opted the parsons and priests (ministers fraternal) in his constituency to be patrons of sorts for the project. They have been helping to recruit foster families and will provide counselling, or otherwise act as sounding boards, for the students and their parents. Many pastors are trained counsellors. The students will also have peer counsellors in big brother/ big sister arrangements.

Additionally, Mr Crawford gained the support of psychiatrists to help with children who carry deeper traumas. He also solicited financial support from the private sector, to help with stipends for foster families, and has asked the education ministry to expand its school meals programme in the host schools. The preference would be for the students to receive two meals at school per day during the school week.

The students in the programme are not only being selected based on limited access to schools. Other issues, such as the proximity of education institutions, their capacity to travel to school, their living conditions, as well as social situations, are also taken into consideration.

MITIGATE RISKS

Based on this matrix, Mr Crawford estimates that over 6,000 students in western Jamaica would qualify for the project.

He concedes the potential for behavioural issues and other social risks with a scheme of this kind. Which is, in part, why the students will arrive in their foster homes at least a week before Christmas. This will allow time for the children to integrate in their new environment, and for their parents to get to know the temporary guardians, the social circumstances in which their children will live, and the support systems that will be available to them. It will also get the students out of the precarious situations in which many of them now survive.

Said Mr Crawford of the potential challenges of the initiative:“there is nothing that has reward that doesn’t have risks. So what we are trying to do is mitigate risks.” This newspaper agrees.

The long-term risks for Jamaica, in social dysfunction and underdeveloped human capital, if the education of thousands of children is severely truncated or abandoned altogether, is far greater than what might flow from behavioural issues in foster homes. These – as this newspaper argued when it suggested that Jamaicans open their homes to hurricane victims – can be contained, if the appropriate structures are in place.

In that regard, Dr Morris Dixon should not only lend her ministry’s imprimatur to Mr Crawford’s initiative, but actively promote it across the political divide, as well as among NGOS. Indeed, the Government, via the education ministry, should specifically allocate funds for its expansion.

There is already a credible template.

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