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Educators at Highest Level in Jamaica Endorse JNBS/VMBS Centres of Excellence Initiative

KINGSTON, Jamaica – Amidst numerous calls for increased focus on specialist teaching techniques for academically challenged students at the secondary level, top educators have endorsed the latest private/public sector thrust to advance this cause Jamaica.

The Centres of Excellence initiative has been hailed by the Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools (JAPSS) president, Nadine Malloy, as dealing a major blow to mediocre performance standards in non-traditional or Upgraded High Schools. The programme intends improve the modes of lesson delivery and the administrative management in those institutions.

The 2004 Taskforce Report on Education Transformation showed where some 80 per cent of secondary graduates did not have the pre-requisite qualification for meaningful employment or entry to post secondary programs. The majority of these students, according to the report, were from non-traditional or Upgraded High Schools. The report cited institutional, teaching, and student factors as contributing to the consistently poor performance and system-wide inefficiencies.

Against this background the Mutual Building Societies Foundation (MBSF), a new joint venture of the Jamaica National Building Society (JNBS) and the Victoria Mutual Building Society (VMBS), is seeking to assist in finding solutions through the establishment of the Centres of Excellence project in support of the Government’s Transformation of Education initiative.

“Children attending these types of non-traditional high schools need to be taught in a special way. As a country, we have either failed to acknowledge this need or do not care,” said the JAPSS President as she lauded the JNBS/VMBS response that she stated will “aid a vast number of students who are functionally illiterate.”

“JAPSS wholeheartedly endorses the Mutual Building Societies Foundation Creating Centres of Excellence project, as both Building Societies have a long and valued partnership in schools,” said Miss Malloy as she addressed the launch of the program at the Hilton Kingston Hotel last week.

According to the JAPSS President, who is principal at an upgraded high school, “the former junior secondary schools of the late 1960s,” that later morphed to form the new upgraded high schools, “have a questionable history with regards to what type of education it really ought to have delivered to a large section of our nation’s children.”

“The Centres of Excellence represents a departure from an old way of thinking that we still have traces of today. It is an inclusive project rather than one designed to exclude. It is a starting point in the reshaping of how many Jamaicans think,” the Buff Bay Secondary School principal opined.

She said many teachers have failed their students by “labeling and treating them as dunces; an attitude that allowed pupils to fall through the cracks; perpetuating the vicious concept of good schools and bad schools.” She noted this was proliferating the misconception “that if you are a skilled worker then you were less than the rest.”

Meanwhile, Hopeton Henry, immediate past president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, (JTA) said the project will go a far way in challenging the two-tiered status quo that exists in the high school system.

“This is an important move that will focus away from the glitter and glamour of urban schools, to the schools situated in the deep rural farming areas where the poor of this country is located. It is very important for us that we seek to do something that will bring equity and balance in the education system.”

Mr. Henry, citing the 2005, Council on Education Report, said “students who are underperforming are channelled mainly into the Upgraded High Schools, while those with higher grades are normally sent to the traditional high schools.”

He said the program would bolster the academic profile at non traditional schools “and this collaborative, institutional arrangement between the building societies and the education system is indeed laudable.”

The Creating Centres of Excellence project of the newly established Mutual Building Societies Foundation is guided by a 16-point strategic plan that spans diagnostic testing, technology supported lesson delivery, highly trained specialist teachers, and a safe learning environment for students.

The program will provide financial and technical support to non-traditional high schools in rural Jamaica over a five year period and is strategically designed to achieve enhanced school performance, improved student performance and community empowerment. Two schools will be admitted to the program each year, with funding and support limited to three years per school. Representatives from the MBSF and local stakeholders will oversee the project in these schools.

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