New year, old woes
Online worries persist as many children still without computers
Published:Wednesday | September 8, 2021 | 12:10 AMAsha Wilks/Gleaner Writer
Monday’s start to the new academic year has resurrected a new sense of dread for Sandrine Bailey.
Unemployed and blind, Bailey says her two teenage children are glum about their prospects as they have no laptops or tablets to log on to Internet classes.
Her 17-year-old son is expected to sit Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams next year. She also has a 14-year-old daughter.
“Sometime me go out a road and tell people weh me a go through and them help me out in a one way, but me say me wah get him one laptop by the grace of God so me a tek me a time a put certain things together,” the mother, who lives in Taylor Land, Bull Bay, said on Tuesday.
The grim future of Bailey’s children – 18 months after the coronavirus pandemic shuttered most schools – amplifies the crisis facing many Jamaican families in an era where online learning is the only means of engagement for students. But many of them have no devices or suffer with spotty Internet connectivity in remote or hilly communities.
It’s unclear whether the cohort of approximately 120,000 students who have virtually been untracked by teachers has grown or what number of laptops or tablets used in the last academic year are still functional.
Orville Thorne, a construction worker, is facing a similar predicament to Bailey’s.
The web-based applications utilised by his sons’ school have not been operating properly, said Thorne, which he fears will cause students to be off-pace with the curriculum.
With no tablets or laptops available for ease of learning, his children must now rely on the tiny displays of cell phone screens.
“Normally is just the likkle phone him use ... . It difficult fi him because some time him have to a strain him eye,” Thorne told The Gleaner.
Nine-year-old Daniel Francis, who was seen travelling with his school bag to his grandmother’s house on Tuesday, was fortunate to have benefited last academic year from a loaner tablet gifted by a teacher.
Daniel’s grandmother, Rose Powell, is grateful for the assistance they received from teachers at his school, Friendship Brook Primary.
“God has really given me the patience and the strength to help him,” Powell exclaimed, explaining that it has been difficult getting him to focus in online classes.
This year, however, he will have to tough it out on a cell phone.
Powell sought help for Daniel in the pandemic terms, offering to pay others to help her grandson in subjects in she was not proficient.
“What I don’t know, I pay somebody and ask them to help,” she said.
Minister of Education Fayval Williams said in a national broadcast on Sunday that the Government was committed to decreasing the concerning levels of learning loss.
“This year, we will redouble, triple, quadruple our efforts to reach our students who were unreachable last year. We must remain true to our mission of not leaving any child behind,” Williams said.
Dr Angela Brown Burke, opposition spokesperson on education, said that many parents were worried because their children have not been actively engaged in formal schooling since March 2020.
Brown Burke urged parents to contact their children’s principal.
“Ideally, there should be greater coordination and leadership from the ministry, but in its absence, it is even more important for parents to keep abreast of what is happening at their children’s schools, as they enter this new school year,” she said in a press statement on Monday.