SECONDARY SCHOOLS have been given the proverbial basket to carry water with the cost-sharing programme. The institutions are now facing a serious financial crisis in day-to-day operations. Yes, the entire public service is facing a cash crunch. But the schools have been pushed into their present precarious positions by public policy decisions which may have appeared at the time to be good politics but could only have the negative economic consequences to the operations of the schools which now have administrators wringing their hands and warning of imminent closures.
Each child in secondary education is required to make a cost-sharing contribution to the cost of their education and that amount is determined on a school-by-school basis between the school administration and the Ministry of Education. The cost-sharing decision was on account of Government's declared inability to continue to carry full costs. In reversal of that position, the recent historic Education Agreement between Opposition and Government specifies the phasing out of cost-sharing.
No child is to be denied access to secondary education and turned away from school for being unable to meet cost-sharing obligations. As common sense dictates, if the schools are to remain financially viable and functional to provide their students with an education at all then someone has to subsidise students who are unable to meet cost-sharing requirements.
The Government has a subsidy scheme based on proof of need. Not all of a growing number of applicants can be facilitated. Parents complain of being embarrassed in the application process. And since no child can be turned away from school, whether paid for by family or Government or not at all, many parents simply do not bother to pay or to apply for assistance.
To compound the already messy situation, the Government does not honour in a timely fashion the disbursement of even the allocated cost-sharing subsidy funds. And it is the school administrators who are left by this dysfunctional two-horse policy, which is inherently dishonest and dishonourable, to face unpayable utilities bills, to run institutions without basic supplies, and to provide 'quality' education to students.
The magnitude of the problem exposed by the Association of Principals and Vice-Principals of newly upgraded Secondary Schools in a Gleaner Editors' Forum is alarming. In one school only 11 of 855 students had paid a fee of $5,500 in full. The electricity supply had been disconnected for non-payment. Another institution was owed $6 million in fee subsidy by the Government. All the schools are grinding to a halt and are facing wholesale closure or merely becoming holding pens for their charges under abysmal conditions. The forum report triggered a release of some overdue subsidies. We are not convinced that the problem of paying for secondary education, rooted as it is in contradictory public policy, is resolved.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
