Empty desks, shattered routines

WESTERN BUREAU:

In classrooms across western Jamaica, empty desks still tell the unfinished story of a hurricane whose most lasting damage may not be measured in roofs lost, but in children still unable to find their way back.

Principals, guidance counsellors and social workers have been criss-crossing communities, dialling dead phone numbers, knocking on doors and following rumours of families who may have moved on, on a mission to find students who vanished from classrooms after Hurricane Melissa tore across the island last October, uprooting homes, livelihoods and, in many cases, children’s connection to school.

Months later, hundreds of students remain unaccounted for or absent, not because they refuse to learn, but because survival intervened.

At Anchovy High School in St James, Principal Lavern Stewart said the hunt for missing students has been relentless since January, focused largely on children in grades seven to nine who simply did not return when schools reopened.

“We had 51 students who we were not able to account for, and we were able to identify some who had migrated internationally and locally. Some students were taken by their parents overseas, or migrated to other parishes, based on what happened to their homes in western Jamaica, and we are now down to under 20 students that we are still not yet able to find,” said Stewart.

Displacement, she explained to The Sunday Gleaner, has been compounded by silence.

“Some parents have taken their children to other parishes and to other relatives, but have not reported the movement. Also, many of them lost their devices, so the numbers that we are trying to reach them on, we are not getting them on those numbers, especially from persons who were inhabitants of Catherine Hall who lost everything, and that would have created a gap in communication,” Stewart added, citing the devastating flooding in Montego Bay’s Catherine Hall area during the hurricane.

The story is strikingly similar in neighbouring parishes.

At Muschett High School in Trelawny, Principal Leighton Johnson said entire families were scattered in the aftermath of the Category 5 storm, forcing schools to operate more like tracing agencies.

“Some of our students have been registered in other schools on the basis that they were dislocated, and their families have relocated to other sections of the island to include Kingston, Clarendon, and sections of Manchester and St Ann. Our guidance counsellors have been doing home visits and visiting communities, trying to find these individuals, and we have found some of them,” Johnson outlined.

The cost of the disruption has been severe for the most vulnerable.

“Some students have lost everything, and their families are in a state of destitution. Several of those students are PATH (Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education) beneficiaries, so in terms of PATH lunches they are taken care of, and we have secured several pieces of uniforms and distributed them to the students who indicated difficulty,” Johnson continued. “At last count, we were unable to locate 16 students, but we were successful in finding 53 students right across the school grades seven to 11, and we accounted for our grade 12 students.”

A wider national challenge

Government data suggest these school-level struggles are part of a wider national challenge. According to Ministry of Education data given to The Sunday Gleaner on February 2, some 583 students across Jamaica’s seven educational regions remain temporarily relocated at other schools following Melissa, which struck on October 28, 2025.

Two weeks ago, Education Minister Dr Dana Morris Dixon told the Senate that post-hurricane absenteeism was at 18 per cent in Region 3, covering Trelawny and St Ann, and 28 per cent in Region 4, which includes St James, Hanover and Westmoreland – areas that suffered some of the worst infrastructural damage.

Dr Michelle Pinnock, director for Region 4, said more than a thousand students are still missing from classrooms, though the number is slowly declining.

“There is a team of persons to include deans of disciplines, guidance counsellors, nurses, and social workers, and we make telephone calls to the numbers that we have [for students] and we do home visits. A number of the children have relocated, so we are in dialogue with their parents, and we make sure to contact the schools that are in close proximity to them,” Pinnock told The Sunday Gleaner on Friday.

“There are some persons for whom we have organised for transfers, so the number of 1,138 students out of school is lessened each week, and I am sure that this coming week we will have a lesser number,” she added.

Yet even as schools and ministry officials search, a quieter shift has been taking place among some students — from classroom to job site. Educators report that economic desperation has pushed children into early employment, blurring the line between temporary absence and permanent dropout. At Muschett High, which operates on shifts, Johnson said administrators have been forced to adapt, placing those students on the evening shift.

“There are some students I know who are currently employed and have indicated that, since Melissa, they have been engaged in different areas. We have had to relax our operations to ensure that students who are gainfully employed to make ends meet and help their families are able, as best as possible, to be here by 12:00,” said Johnson.

It is against this backdrop that the National Secondary Students’ Council (NSSC) has begun raising the alarm, urging that the crisis be treated not as a post-hurricane inconvenience, but as a long-term threat to students’ future.

Deeply troubling

While commending the efforts of the education ministry to stabilise schools, NSSC President Brian Anderson said the continued absence of students is deeply troubling.

“What we need right now is to ensure that all the necessary measures are in place to bring our young people back into the learning space. I am concerned by the number of students who have still not returned to school, based on statistics provided by several institutions, because the longer students remain outside the education system, the harder it becomes for them to recover academically,” Anderson told The Sunday Gleaner.

“While it has been a few months since the storm, we cannot scale back our support just yet. We still need continued assistance from both government and non-government organisations,” he continued.

Anderson noted that some students have openly told the council they are choosing work over school to support their families.

“When we spoke to students, one thing they pointed out was that a lot of students are not returning to school, and instead they are working or looking for work to get money to provide basic necessities for their family members and themselves. As a result, they do not want to return to school because they are already receiving benefits from working,” said Anderson. “This will eventually hurt them in the long run, especially when they become adults and start working on their own but do not have the educational background to support them.”

For students themselves, the barriers are not only economic.

Deja Bremmer, head girl of Manning’s School in Westmoreland, told The Sunday Gleaner that emotional recovery remains an overlooked piece of the puzzle.

“Due to the passage of Hurricane Melissa, lives have been very much disrupted. Absenteeism has increased, homes were damaged, livelihoods interrupted, and many students struggle both financially and emotionally to return to school. To support reintegration, students need access to emotional and mental health support, along with financial assistance where possible,” said Bremmer. “I think that all schools should also adopt more flexible routines to accommodate ongoing challenges such as limited electricity and infrastructural damage.”

For now, the search continues – for missing students, for lost motivation, and for a sense of normalcy that remains elusive.

christopher.thomas@gleanerjm.com