ON the eve of the new school year, the Government has admitted that its own tardiness in awarding the printing contract for free primary school textbooks will yet again result in most of the island’s 700 primary schools receiving the books late.

Ironically, the Government a year ago yanked the contract from snail-paced local firms and awarded it to an American company, in a bid to get the textbooks in the hands of the thousands of grades one to six students at the start of the September term.

“The contract was awarded late,” Edwin Thomas, the education ministry’s public relations officer, acknowledged in an interview with the Sunday Observer. “The ideal time is long before it was (actually) awarded.”

The latest contract was awarded in June, three or four months behind its usual time, drawing criticism from the Opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and educators worried that it could hurt the learning process of the students.

JLP spokesman for education, Senator Anthony Johnson, said the relatively small J$3 million the Government would save from awarding the printing contract to the overseas firm — Von Hoffman Corporation — could not compensate for the problems associated with not having the books on time.

“It is very unfortunate that the Government did this for a mere $3 million,” he said. “Three million dollars is a very small amount when you compare it to the benefits to the economy when the money stays here,” declared Johnson.

Although most schools are scheduled to open this week, only schools in three parishes — Portland, St Thomas and St Catherine — are down to receive books in the first week, with deliveries to the remaining parishes expected to be completed early October, according to the Ministry of Education.

“It [lateness of the texts] will affect us badly, particularly in our second week, because even though the teachers may have books to teach from, the children will not have their books to work from,” complained Baldwin Baxter, acting principal at the Duhaney Park Primary School in Kingston.

According to Baxter, the school had, over the years, “tried to create” a back-up system to deal with lateness by asking students to give back used books to the school. This, however, may prove insufficient.

“If we even had a few, that would still not be enough, as effective teaching cannot be done without the necessary books,” he remarked.

Cleavy Downer, acting principal at the Swallowfield Primary and Junior High School, said his school, too, operated an “emergency stock” system by ordering extra books each year. But the emergency stock would not guarantee a “one-to-one” ratio and it now appeared that two students might have to share one book when school reopened this week.

Downer said he would meet with his staff to see how best they could work around the situation. But he expressed strong hopes that the books would arrive “within reasonable time”. “This will obviously affect us, since we will not be able to give the children homework from these books, it will definitely limit us,” he said.

The late delivery of the texts is nothing new to local schools, having had to deal with similar situations in the past, until the Government, grappling with complaints of the late delivery or non-arrival of the texts, sought to fix the problem by awarding the delivery contract to an overseas firm.

The Government’s primary textbook scheme provides nearly two million texts free of charge to primary and all-age schools across the island. Established in 1984, the programme sought to provide students from grades one to six with suitable textbooks in mathematics, language arts and reading and later included textbooks in science and social studies in 1990.

Von Hoffman Corporation won the Government contract to print the texts after bidding almost J$3 million less than local companies who, up until last year, enjoyed what has been described as one of the largest single contracts awarded to local printers.

According to the education ministry, the US-based firm had tendered a bid of nearly J$51 million as against the Jamaican firms that tendered for almost J$54 million.

The move irked several local companies and the JLP, who chided the Government for giving preference to an overseas firm, despite the benefits keeeping the contracr here would add to the economy.

On Thursday, Senator Johnson described the delay as unfortunate, while chiding the Government for giving out the contracts late in recent years, and insisting that the delay could have been avoided had the Government contracted a local firm to do the printing.

“If they had given out the contract early enough and to local printers, the books would have been out on time because our printers are accustomed to do so,” Johnson told the newspaper. “They have a system where they send the books straight to the schools, there’s no need to consolidate as it does when it goes through the ports.”

The Government’s decision, he said, was “unreasonable” and has hurt the country “substantially”, particularly in an ailing industry. The decision, he said, had forced approximately 300 persons out of jobs.

“In the summer, all the printers who get the sub-contracts have extra people who come in temporarily to do the extra work and those persons look forward to it because this is what they depend on to send their children back to school, while the extra work put the regular staff into overtime so they can make a little extra money,” he added.

Johnson said he was particularly concerned that the children might suffer as a result of the delay.

“What it means is a number of schools will be starting without the books and it is unfortunate to know that though they do not have anything to do with the lateness of the contract, the children will suffer.”

On Friday, newly-elected president of the Jamaica Teachers Association (JTA), Wentworth Gabbidon, expressed his concern, saying the late deliveries “will certainly affect the start-up of classes”.

“I am concerned that it is again late, but I appreciate that some efforts are being made to get the books to the schools a little earlier,” he told the Sunday Observer. “It will definitely set back class work.”

But the education ministry’s Thomas insisted the lateness of the books was “nothing new”, brushing aside Johnson’s claims that they would have been delivered on time had they been printed locally.

“As far as I know, the books have been late more than once, it is nothing new,” Thomas told the Sunday Observer.

He said for the schools that would not receive new stock, the ministry was asking that they turn to residual stock and to check with regional offices to find out which schools had such stocks that they could share.

Thomas argued that the students would not suffer as a result of the delay, saying they could move on to other parts of the curriculum which were not textbook-based.

“It is not that teaching will have to stop, because there are activities which can be substituted until the texts arrive,” he said.

Gabbidon suggested that the ministry arrange to have the textbooks available to the schools between July and August, as a means of ensuring they were in place for the start of the new school year.

But the JTA head said he had no problem with whether the books were printed here or overseas.

“I am not sure if it is a problem,” he said. “I do support local initiatives, but at the same time we are looking for the best and we want people to put out the books on time, so if it means we have to go abroad, then so be it.”