Petrina Francis, Education ReporterMICHAEL CLARKE, president of the Jamaica Teachers Association (JTA), said his organisation could not prevent teachers from taking up overseas offers. But he advised them to be cautious about the terms being offered by their new employers.
A sign of the renewed interest in local teachers was the advertisements placed in The Gleaner on Saturday and Sunday by Visiting International Faculty, soliciting Jamaican teachers to work in the United States.
Given the salary conditions that exist in the profession locally, some would take up the offer, Mr. Clarke said. But he urged those teachers to exercise caution.
"They should have an understanding of the kind of schools where they will be teaching," Irwine Clare, Sr., managing director of Caribbean Immigrant Services Inc., in New York, told The Gleaner. He said, "One of the problems that teachers came up against when they came to New York was that they were placed in the hard-pressed schools in our community and they were not ready for that type of socialisation and they were not ready for that type of community."
CONTRACT
They first had to ensure that they had a contract with the institution where they would be teaching, Mr. Clare said. He noted that the contract should not only state the income that they will be earning but also the type of immigration documentation that would be issued.
"We have always said that we are not against the teachers going but it should be managed, and in a timely way," Senator Noel Monteith, minister of state in the Ministry of Education, told The Gleaner. He said an agreement was arrived at last year in terms of the managed movement of teachers.
