Editorial | Education reconstruction

Education Minister Dana Morris Dixon’s establishment last month of a committee to monitor the rehabilitation of schools damaged by Hurricane Melissa has not halted criticism by the teachers’ union of the pace of the reconstruction.

Given the scale of the destruction left by the category-5 storm, more than 600 schools were damaged, over half of them severely, so, it would be unreasonable to expect that the education facilities would be restored in less than a year.

However, the ongoing concerns of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) and its current president, La Sonja Harrison, provide a legitimate basis for a review of the government’s approach to the post-hurricane recovery of the education sector, including its soft infrastructure, and whether adjustments might be warranted.

Frankly, there is a haziness surrounding the school reconstruction effort. It does not appear to fall within the portfolio of the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA), the special-purpose vehicle established to manage the Melissa reconstruction.

Seemingly, the reconstruction, with an estimated cost of J$26 billion, according to Minister Morris Dixon, is the responsibility of the education ministry and its donor fundraising agency, the National Education Trust (NET). The government’s budget for the current fiscal year earmarked J$18 billion for education reconstruction. Up to July, J$5.6 billion was reported to have been spent.

In the weeks before Dr Morris Dixon named her Melissa School Infrastructure Recovery and Resilience Oversight Committee, JTA officials had complained about the pace at which the reconstruction was proceeding, whether there would be sufficient money to accomplish the job, and whether it was being done efficiently and with sufficient transparency.

“Their goal is really to help us in terms of accountability, quality assurance and transparency across the repair, rehabilitation and reconstruction of public education facilities affected by Hurricane Melissa,” the education minister said of the committee.

REPEATED CONCERNS

However, after touring hurricane-affected schools in western Jamaica last week, Ms Harrison, the JTA president, repeated concerns about the state of the infrastructure and the conditions in which teaching and learning were expected to take place.

“During our visits, we encountered critically dilapidated infrastructure, serious mould and termite infestations,” she said.

Dr Morris Dixon’s survey group is modelled on EPOC (Economic Programme Oversight Committee), the body that reviewed Jamaica’s economic reform programme with the International Monetary Fund and became the go-to arrangement for ensuring public accountability of government projects.

However, EPOC was not an implementing agency. It reviewed and reported on technical work done by government agencies on policies to which the administration was deeply committed and around which there was national consensus. EPOC’s credibility was enhanced by the personalities at its helm and a belief in their willingness to highlight any deficiencies in implementation should they occur. The IMF’s ability to trigger the closure of international financial markets to Jamaica also concentrated minds.

Like EPOC, the School Infrastructure Recovery and Resilience Oversight Committee is not an implementing agency. It will periodically report on performance, although the process by which this will be done is not clear. However, this newspaper does not doubt that it will discharge its responsibilities with integrity.

The larger problem is likely to be funding, capacity and how the reconstruction effort is defined.

ESTABLISHING SERRF

It is in that context that, last December, in the aftermath of the hurricane, The Gleaner proposed the establishment of a School Education Recovery and Resilience Fund (SERRF) as a ring-fenced subset of the broader national reconstruction framework. SERRF, we recommended, would focus exclusively on education, especially in the disaster-hit areas of western Jamaica. It would work with NET, utilising the agency’s fundraising experience and the project-implementation capacity of the Jamaica Social Investment Fund (JSIF).

Under this arrangement, a fixed percentage of inflows from donor agencies and disaster-insurance receipts would be channelled to SERRF, which would have a window to fast-track grants for emergency school repairs. Beyond the urgent and short-term projects required to get children back into a learning environment, SERRF would categorise the reconstruction requirements of institutions and establish clear timelines for the completion of each project based on its classification.

Resilience in education is about more than the availability of physical infrastructure, which is why The Gleaner also proposed that resources should be channelled into teacher training, curriculum development, technology support and community engagement.

All of this would require oversight and transparency, which gives relevance to a body similar to the one established by Dr Morris Dixon, only that in this case it would have a broader mission as part of a larger national portfolio.