OCHO RIOS, St Ann – Jamaica Teachers’ Association president Ruel Reid says he is not happy with the new arrangement that allows only government workers in the Kingston Metropolitan Area to escape the new fare increases announced by Transport Minister Robert Pickersgill on Friday.

“Frankly, we are not very impressed with the arrangement that is being made,” Reid told the Observer yesterday, the first day of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) 41st annual conference being held here.

The new fare structure sees a flat rate of $50 to travel on the government-owned JUTC buses, but civil servants whose salaries have been frozen until March 2006 under a memorandum of understanding between their unions and the government will pay a flat rate of $35 using a pre-paid card.

They will, however, have to pay higher fares if they travel on privately-run buses and taxi cabs, which were also granted increases, effective Sunday.

However, Reid’s concern yesterday was for the thousands of government workers, including a number of the island’s 20,000 teachers in the rural areas who will not benefit from the concessionary fares granted to those in the Kingston Metropolitan Region.

“That is why we’re going to be beginning our negotiation for salary. what we want is salary adjustment across the board because we know that while you may have a system to work in the Kingston Metropolitan Area, it is impossible to replicate that system in the rest of Jamaica.

So our response with the spiralling rate increase is to expeditiously get a salary agreement to be effected come the end of April 2006,” Reid said.

But while the JTA president was eager to commence wage talks in September, he said this would not cloud his vision as to where he wants to help take education and the nation.

“While we know that salary is going to be an issue for us to tackle, we want to say to Jamaica that we are going to be an active partner in collaborating with government and all other stakeholders to effect real transformation in education in Jamaica,” Reid said.

He said his commitment for his one-year term include addressing the deficiencies at the early childhood level.

“We’re going to be asking that each JTA District Association adopts an early childhood institution so we can help them to improve their quality and thereby improve the quality of student coming out of the early childhood sector into the primary sector, and so the outcome of education will be greatly enhanced,” said Reid.