Erica Virtue, Staff Reporter
TWELVE schools in Kingston and St. Andrew's violent inner cities, account for nearly 50 per cent of the overstaffing in the teaching profession, reported by the Ministry of Education.
But the overstaffing resulted because of the loss of students who fled to schools in less volatile communities.
Ministry officials have admitted that at least one school is overstaffed by as many as 40 teachers, despite the Government's stipulated ratio of 1:35 in primary and all-age schools and an average of 1:20 in other schools.
"...If you have 1,000 schools and each school is overstaffed by one, that is 1,000 teachers. But we can't have a situation where there are schools overstaffed by 40 and another school by 20-odd. It can't continue. And we have other schools with large numbers of children," Acting Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Valrie Been, said last week.
Except for Munro College in St. Elizabeth and Port Antonio High School in Portland, each of which has 10 teachers too many, no other schools have such high levels of overstaffing in rural area.
Among the schools in the Corporate Area with more teachers than they need are Denham Town Primary, Donald Quarrie, Edith Dalton-James, Haile Selassie and Holy Trinity Comprehensive High schools.
However, Eric Downie, general secretary of the Jamaica Teacher's Association (JTA), which represents a large percentage of teachers, said that the formula used to determine overstaffing was flawed "from day one".
"The Ministry finally sent the list of schools where overstaffing has been noted, to us, last week. The first flaw is that this list is up-to-date to February, that was before the end of the last school year. Many things could have changed between then and the beginning of the school year."
According to him, the JTA has been informed by the Ministry that another list will be available in October, and suggested that the Ministry should have waited until then to determine the degree of overstaffing, because a better picture of the system could be ascertained.
He said that the Ministry was acting on the recommendation of the KPMG Peat Marwick public sector audit done last year, which ignored the reasons for attrition of students.
According to him, "the obvious reasons for the attrition of students in those communities were not taken into consideration, as people were only playing with figures."
Secondary issue
He said, while the overstaffing issue became the main focus of the audit, the over-population of many schools to which many of the children fled was a secondary issue.
Some schools which accommodate some fleeing children include John Mills All Age, Mico Practising All Age and Windward Road Primary. At least one school is recording class sizes of more than 40 students to one teacher, and in one case as many as 55 to one teacher.
Meanwhile, the JTA said that in addition to the redundancy exercise, teachers who reached retirement age are also being sent home.
And Ms. Been said that although it was stated that 300 teachers were to go, "there is nothing definite until they (teachers) start re-locating."
She said that overstaffed schools have been asked to recruit teachers only from understaffed schools, but if the teachers refused to re-locate to where their skills were needed, the Ministry would have to invoke the law.
She said under the law, teachers are allowed a term's notice, all leave that they have, and if they have more than 10 years service, they will be retired. Under 10 years service, they will get a lump sum payment.
