The age-old proverb ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ is generally accepted as sound advice. But in an environment where there is little room for play, students of Mount Hermon Primary School have had to adapt.
“We have lots of unsafe areas,” teacher Cynthia Wolfe Anderson told the Jamaica Observer last Friday during a tour of the small compound which has approximately 20 out-of-bounds areas labelled ‘Unsafe Area’.
According to Wolfe Anderson, safety is one of the school’s major concerns as landslides and soil erosion have been getting the better of the terrain.
“All of this is going,” Wolfe Anderson said, pointing to the edge of the property in Riversdale, St Catherine. “We’re trying to hold it back with the planting of grass, but weathering is just making it difficult.”
When asked how the children were controlled, Anderson shivered and said the security guard and other members of staff watch them as they play during the break periods.
The concern for safety is underlined by the fact that the property is not fenced, a project that the school has been hoping to get under way for a while now.
“The persons from the Ministry of Education came and they looked at it for the rails. They said that the rails would have been put up for about a year now [but] there are [still] no rails,” Wolfe Anderson lamented.
She said the lack of fencing has led to incidents of theft from the property. This, she added, has stifled the school’s initiative in poultry rearing.
“We put chickens in it (the coop) [but] we had to stop because over the holidays what persons do, because security is not 24 hours [and] teachers and students are out, the coop is left unsupervised [and] people come help themselves,” the educator told the
Sunday Observer.
The school also experiences water theft, due to the fact that the community suffers from a shortage of the commodity. In addition, furniture and other school amenities are stolen.
“We got some chairs and desks from Food For the Poor and it was a trailer-load of desks and chairs and… some of the times you come, three suites gone, that is a desk and a chair,” she said.
“I brought a new bin into my classroom and I left it, you know, because we have the water shortage in the community. I came back Monday morning, the bin was gone. They moved with the cover, the bin, everything,” Wolfe Anderson said.
But theft and eroding terrain are not the only setbacks for Mount Hermon Primary. According to Wolfe Anderson, there is a decline in the school’s population because of the increase in parents’ concern for the safety of their children when travelling to school.
In the rural community children usually walk to school, but the loneliness of the road has caused parents to reconsider that mode of travel.
“We don’t have enough taxis on this route to say okay, they will get taxi to come. There are only two, sometimes one regular taxi driver, that’s on this route, so to get the children up [here] they have to walk. Parents are saying, ‘no Mount Hermon’ because they can’t take for them to be walking on the lonely road,” she told the Sunday Observer.
The school currently has 103 students enrolled, with the largest class numbering 28. When asked to make a juxtaposition of what the population once was, Wolfe Anderson said when she started working at the school there were over 400 students enrolled.
She also highlighted a need for computers and other high technology items to help enhance the children’s learning experience and save the school money. Mount Hermon Primary is currently without functioning computers and only has one small functional printer.
This was underlined by principal Alvin Walker’s response when asked what was the main thing he would lobby for as headmaster. “One of the main things that we actually lobby for is computers, because we are living in a technological age and children tend to have an affinity to technology. They like technology and that will go a far way in enhancing students’ learning. Everybody is into tablets and such things, we have no such,” he said.
“So we would like to have a computer lab, and even the regular desktop computers, hardly anybody uses those anymore or really go for those, so if we could get some laptops, some tablets, trust me, that would really enhance our effort a whole lot,” he said.
The school has a few computers set up for display in strategic areas, but unfortunately they don’t work. “These are just models for the children,” Wolfe Anderson told the Sunday Observer as she guided the newspaper through the computer lab.
“The computers you see, we got as a donation,” she explained. “They worked for about two months or something and stopped. We tried to fix some, but the cost was too much, so they are just here stored.”
When asked how test papers were printed, the teacher stated that private institutions are utilised.
“We collect donations from children towards it, and then we’d go out and print, or a teacher would take his or her printer from home and we use it. There is only one functioning printer which is used in the guidance office,” she explained.
Echoing the call for technology, the principal also highlighted the need for a photocopying machine to assist the school during test periods.
The school has also been without Internet access for the past year, courtesy of vandals who have stolen the phone lines which have not been replaced. According to Wolfe Anderson, the school has since adapted and has been using teachers’ cellphones to circulate administrative and other school-related matters.
Walker also noted the need for an additional tank to store drinking water for children, as the five tanks on the compound are used to store rain water, which is not safe for drinking.
“The water that we have at the school, the children are not allowed to drink it. They have to carry their own when they come to school. Who don’t carry, drink juice,” Wolfe Anderson told the Sunday Observer.
The stored water is sufficient to maintain the canteen and the bathrooms, but during the drought periods water use and distribution become problematic.
“We pray that there isn’t a drought, because when it’s drought we have to depend on the truck… and we have to wait weeks upon weeks upon weeks and then you see the truck finally roll in,” Wolfe Anderson said.
But staff at Mount Hermon Primary are not daunted by their reality and continue to work to improve student performance.
“We have to see school as a business these days, because there is competition. Everybody pretty much is going for the best in the area, so if we don’t perform on par with them, and even better than them, then we will always be losing our students to them,” the headmaster said in reference to the declining population.
He said that last year there was an increase in the school’s numeracy and literacy rates, noting that they have made tremendous strides in recent times.
“For 2015 we improved our numeracy rate from 41 per cent to 55 per cent, and literacy from 71 to 85, that’s commendable, so we just want to continue to improve in that area; go in the right direction,” he said.
He admitted that Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT) pass rates are a challenge, but said efforts and changes are being made to improve this,especially because in the education ministry’s recently released results, Mount Hermon Primary’s averages were below the regional and national averages.
But the principal has been using his background in Mathematics training to help strengthen the math grades of the sixth grade boys – the ones considered the weakest in that area. What he does is take them from class for an hour daily and tutors them. Additionally, he hosts a Saturday class for all GSAT students.
“We have a lot of potential, but we just need to put the effort in and we have been putting the effort in to rise to the level where we want to reach,” he noted.
“So, in order to be able to have the enrolment of the school from where it is now, we have to look more at improving the performances in the academics, as well as the co-curricular activities. So we have our 4H club, our Red Cross, JCDC [Jamaica Cultural Development Commission], spelling, all those things. So we are trying to do our best in these areas because we want to attract the children, even if it’s not from this area,” he continued.
The National Education Inspectorate report done recently labelled the school a failing institution for its poor infrastructure. But with over half the population on PATH (the Government programme that provides assistance to needy Jamaicans), the school has had difficulty collecting its development fund from parents – a mere $1,500 annually – which would assist in infrastructural improvement.
That, Walker said, is due to the fact that many parents in the farming community are not working. “Just a few persons pay in spite of us encouraging them to pay, even in small instalments,” Walker said.
