Editorial | Tracking all students

The disclosure that 335 students remain missing from Jamaica’s classrooms five months after Hurricane Melissa highlights the urgency of establishing a robust system to monitor children’s school performance and track their whereabouts if, and when, they go missing.

It was expected that whatever mechanism was developed to trace absent students during the COVID-19 pandemic would have been refined and supplemented by a digital database. However, as disclosed by Dr Kasan Troupe, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Education, the system developed during COVID-19 is only now being reactivated – or, perhaps, resurrected. A structured, permanent tracking mechanism is to follow at a later date.

In the meantime, schools’ guidance counsellors, deans of discipline, and regional directors – assisted by local stakeholders – are being asked to go into communities to determine what has happened to students who, following the hurricane, have not turned up for classes anywhere.

That some students have not returned to school – some may have dropped out altogether – should not surprise anyone. Indeed, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, which halted face-to-face teaching and learning for nearly two years, an estimated 120,000 students could not be accounted for. That figure represented more than a quarter of all students in the public school system. They neither logged on to online classes nor were they available to receive regular assignment packages for home-based education.

When schools eventually reopened, most students trickled back. The Ministry of Education, however, never reported what percentage remained permanently absent, thereby joining the significant proportion of students who fail to complete their secondary education. An estimated five per cent of students drop out before the end of grade nine, and up to eight per cent exit the system between grades nine and 10.

While COVID-19 was economically, psychologically, and socially disruptive for Jamaican families, Hurricane Melissa – which slammed into the western third of the island in October – brought all of those challenges, plus physical loss and displacement.

The Category 5 storm destroyed or severely damaged an estimated 30,000 homes, with thousands more suffering lesser damage. Hundreds of schools were either destroyed or damaged, as were transportation networks and other communication systems. As a result, many families were forced to relocate, and some students transferred to, or were placed in, other schools.

In this context, the number of unaccounted-for students –just under one per cent of those enrolled in public schools – may, on the surface, appear to be a reasonable achievement. Or, as Dr Troupe put it:

“When we returned in January (after the schools’ Christmas holidays), we were over 1,000 (in missing students). But if you compare that to COVID, we can celebrate some gains here. It was very difficult for the ministry to locate our children, but we have been doing much better.”

NO NATIONAL DATABASE

That statistic, however, does not tell the fuller, or deeper, truth. These are 335 boys and girls, many of them adolescents, who may join the ranks of the approximately quarter of Jamaica’s 14- to 24-year-olds – more than 125,000 – who are not in education, employment, or training: the so-called NEET group. By and large, this cohort is at the greatest risk of social dysfunction.

By the ministry’s own assessment during the pandemic, its initiative to locate missing students worked reasonably well, despite numerous challenges. That programme, therefore, should have been fully documented as a best practice, embedded into the institutional memory of the ministry, and ready to be rolled out – adapted as necessary – in future crises.

It appears that none of this was done, or if it was, it was not appropriately activated in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane. Furthermore, there is no national database that flags students when they transfer schools – something that should be linked to a student’s permanent school record, much like a transcript.

“We do have some more work to do in the ministry to address that (a system to precisely track transferred students),” Dr Troupe said. “But notwithstanding, we must celebrate the work on the ground for all our helping professionals in the field – our principals who have been calling, our guidance counsellors… .”

It is also possible that some students were not absent from school at all, but simply were not recorded as having moved to another institution.

In any event, The Gleaner is grateful to all those who have helped to close the gaps and to find and account for the missing. We hope that every remaining student is located and supported in finding a way back into the classroom.

But in this age of digital technology, all students enrolled in public schools should be captured on a central database capable of tracking them from institution to institution. The Ministry of Education has been upgrading its management information system. This function should be a core element of that system – not only to track enrolment and attendance, but also to provide real-time profiles of student performance.