The education ministry on Friday wrapped up a two-week remedial reading camp to fast-track the recovery of 300 students who failed the Grade Four Literacy Test in May this year.

But trainers last week, complaining that the camp was too short, doubted it would have much effect, given that most of the students were unable to read beyond the grade-one level.

“The time is not enough,” said Deonne Raymond, one of the New York-based teachers assisting the project. “The kids are trainable (but) even though they’ve gotten something from us, we can’t do what we really wanted to do.”

The students selected for the pilot project were divided into three residential camps – Oberlin High School in rural St Andrew, St Hilda’s High in St Ann, and the College of Arts, Science and Education in Portland.

In addition to the reading classes, their daily itinerary included individual counselling, nature walks, field trips and training in music.

The $7-million pilot project was assisted by 30 volunteers – all Jamaican teachers from New York – who were transported here by Air Jamaica and American Airlines. USAID assisted the ministry with sponsorship and Scholastic Inc from New York donated 1,000 books and other materials and provided training in their Summer Success Curriculum.

“We are now looking at how we can provide follow-up for these students,” Education Minister Maxine Henry-Wilson told the Sunday Observer last Thursday during a tour of the Oberlin camp.

She admitted that it would not be possible to move the students to near mastery or mastery of the grade four curriculum in just two weeks. However, she reasoned that removing them from their environment to retrain them would, in itself, bear some fruit.

The students at the Oberlin camp, for instance, attend either Jones Town Primary or Trench Town Primary – schools that sit in areas prone to violence.

“Even if we succeed in changing their (negative) learned behaviour, we have accomplished something,” Henry-Wilson said.

Close to 50,000 primary schoolchildren sit the Grade Four Literacy Test each year. The test helps both staff and the ministry to identify those students who have mastered the grade four curriculum, which is necessary for promotion to grade five.

According to education ministry statistics, only 50 per cent of all the students who do the test show mastery of the curriculum, 20 per cent achieve near mastery, and at least 15,000 or roughly 30 per cent show ‘non-mastery’ or are considered ‘at risk’.

However, due to limited space, and to avoid overcrowding, schools generally choose to promote students rather than let them repeat grade four. Some schools even separate ‘at risk’ students from the general population, placing them in ‘shelters’ for remedial purposes.

But the ministry noted that the very best efforts of the schools are being undermined by other factors, some having to do with parents and their home environment.

The 300 students selected for the pilot were taken from the ‘at risk’ group. Most of them were reading at the grade one level or below. In fact, staff at the Oberlin camp told the Sunday Observer that a word recognition test administered on July 4, the camp’s first day, showed ‘a few’ who did not even recognise the letters of the alphabet.

That reality was cause for serious concern among the trainers who were scheduled to administer a resit of the Grade Four Literacy Test on the camp’s final day.

“It is unlikely they will pass the test,” Thadeous Donald, the Oberlin camp co-ordinator, said Thursday. At this level, he said, the best that can be obtained is that students will develop an “increased interest in reading”.

Last Thursday when the Sunday Observer visited Oberlin, students and some of the teachers were wearing bright red, blue or yellow T-shirts with the camp logo, and jeans. In the classrooms, students repeated vowel sounds or words, they made stories from pictures, played instruments or did art work.

Outside the classrooms, their teachers spoke in amazement about their observations since the programme started.

They told of aggressive students who became subdued after developing a relationship with their mentors. Some were from so poor a background that they were not accustomed to sleeping on a bed, one teacher said.

Another explained that on a visit to Castleton Gardens where a river runs through the attraction, one child pointed out to his teacher that he had never seen a river before.