Why so much school reopening confusion?

TTUTA warned on Friday there would be problems for several schools when they open today. The teacher’s union president, Martin Lum Kin, sounded a conciliatory tone with the permanent secretary of the Education Ministry, expressing confidence that if funding for school repairs had been made available to the PS, schools would have received their allocations for repairs.

It’s possible that Lum Kin was entirely too hopeful about a situation that recurs with appalling regularity, leaving students unsettled at schools that should be supportive and nurturing.

On the Education Ministry’s slate of 737 projects to be completed during the 2022-2023 school year, 180 proved too extensive to complete over the July-August vacation and four of the schools are not ready to receive students.

Among those affected are St Rose’s RC school, partially condemned since February, and Sisters Road Anglican, condemned in January.

At the four worst-affected schools, students will be accommodated through hybrid and remote-learning teaching techniques.

It’s untenable that after more than six months, primary school children are expected to continue their education stuck in makeshift spaces in schools making temporary space available for in-person classes.

But even those students have some idea of where they will be going today.

The Catholic Board of Education stepped up to prepare 17 schools and teachers to take in Venezuelan migrant students who pass an English assessment, but the numbers are small.

Just 100 students have been identified as eligible. That process is pending, and any expansion of the programme will depend on resolving the impasse over filling teacher vacancies between denominational schools and the Teaching Service Commission.

In July, the High Court accepted a plea by the Presbyterian church for judicial review of the matter, which began eight months ago after the commission changed its procedure for recruitment at denominational schools. The schools argue that the change is in defiance of the concordat.

At the end of the last school year, Fifth Company Baptist School had a student-teacher ratio of one to 50 – ten teachers for 500 students – because of outstanding vacancies.

The school won’t know whether the five outstanding vacancies will be addressed until this week.

The Education Ministry is clearly operating with constraints, but none of these problems should have resulted in confusion remaining in the last week of a two-month vacation.

The long and ignominious history of the ministry’s efforts to maintain schools and prepare them for student use, and the notably problematic failures of large-scale refurbishment undertaken during vacations, should have urged the creation of teams assessing the progress of projects, notifying schools of expected timelines and assisting with needed adjustments.

This week’s uncertainties were both manageable and avoidable.