Petrina Francis, Staff Reporter
MONTEITH
SENATOR NOEL Monteith, the Junior Education Minister, has denied claims that students from preparatory schools who sit the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) are given priority placement into traditional high schools over children from primary schools.
The GSAT results were distributed to schools on the weekend and on Monday,
following several weeks of delay. On Monday, some disgruntled parents accused the Education Ministry of giving preferential placement to children from preparatory schools.
"There is no truth in that. A number of primary school (students) have done better than prep schools and are placed in traditional high schools," Sen. Monteith told The Gleaner yesterday.
The Junior Education Minister said placement of students is based on choice, performance and proximity. He noted that, if a preparatory school student performs poorly in GSAT, that child would be sent to a school based on his performance.
On Monday, Beverley Ulett, principal of Vaz Preparatory School in Kingston, told The Gleaner that all but 10 of the 168 students who sat the examination had been placed in traditional high schools.
CHILDREN PLACED ELECTRONICALLY
The Education Ministry informed The Gleaner last year that children were placed electronically, based on choice, availability, and performance. Students and parents have up to five choices.
At the time, Sephlin Myers-Thomas, assistant chief education officer at the Students' Assessment Unit in the Education Ministry, said the ministry had no control over which school a child was sent to.
Mrs. Myers-Thomas boasted of the integrity of the selection process and explained that the database is fed into a system which is coded with students' identification numbers as opposed to their names. She added that this prevents favouritism, because persons managing the system are unaware of the students who are being selected for the different schools.
The Education Ministry further claimed that, if a student's first choice is unavailable because of a lack of space, the computer goes to the child's second choice. If this fails, the process continues until it goes to the fifth choice. If the student failed to be placed in any of the five choices, he or she is placed at a school in close proximity to the ones that were chosen.
The only students who are placed in schools manually, the ministry said, are "the below-level performers."
The GSAT replaced the Common Entrance Examinations in 1999, which for 58 years guided the placement of students in secondary schools.
