EDUCATION Minister Maxine Henry-Wilson says the ministry will have to go back to the drawing board to plan for the school population of Spanish Town, which is already seeing overcrowded classrooms, because of plans for several new developments in and around the old capital.

“In a recent meeting, our project officer pointed out to us that in meeting with some persons who are doing some development planning for Spanish Town, there were so many new housing developments which are planned of which we knew nothing. So we have a significant challenge in terms of space,” Henry Wilson told yesterday’s official launch of the 2006/2007 school year, at a function held at the Excelsior High School in Kingston.

The minister later told the Observer that in attempting to cope with the situation and do more forward planning to balance the classroom space dilemma, the ministry would be requesting all parish councils to advise it of all new and projected developments over a three-to-four-year period.

According to the minister, the space shortage now being experienced in St Catherine and Clarendon was not created because of any inaction by the ministry, but because of population shifts.

“The reason for this is not the work of the Ministry of Education, but the natural movement of persons, which has resulted in areas in which we didn’t have space needs before, now providing us with significant challenges,” the education minister said.

Henry-Wilson told the Observer that the ministry was also trying to develop methods to address informal settlements which also contributed to the shortage of classroom space.

“We also are trying to find a way to deal with informal settlements because that is also an area that burgeons and because we don’t have them on record, when the children come we don’t know how many,” said the minister.

“We find that even with the opening of school this year…there were lots of children coming in who live in the area, but some of them just arrived. So we are hoping to be able to get some data that would allow us to even begin to plan in an orderly way,” Henry-Wilson said.

In the meantime, a new school, the minister said, was being planned for Spanish Town, where the need for more classroom space was even more pressing.

“.We are looking at a spot in the environs of Spanish Town and more than likely it will start as a secondary school,” added the minister.

She said that despite the fact that contractors had complained about doing work in Spanish Town because of the violence, the ministry would be working to ensure that violence did not “become an issue”.

“.Right now, even getting a contractor is a challenge; most of them do not want to go into the area and parents are afraid to send their children; but where we can get land we really are going to try to work with the community to allow us to get the school properly built,” Henry- Wilson told the Observer.

She said, too, that although there were plans to create about 15,600 school spaces by the 2007/8 school term, it was by no means adequate to meet the needs in the island. She said the ministry was currently conducting a space audit of schools, which is expected to be completed by November.

The education minister said the audit would, among other things, allow the administration to have an inventory of the conditions of the school so it would know the needs for urgent and long term repairs.

Meanwhile, president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association Hopeton Henry said school heads must take the initiative to do forward-planning and determine what resources were necessary and pass the information on to the relevant authorities ahead of time to always ensure a smooth start-up to the school year.

The Opposition spokesperson on education, Andrew Holness, who also addressed the function, called for a greater involvement of alumni and Parent Teacher Associations in the development of schools, noting that schools which had strong support groups performed noticeably well.

– dunkleya@jamaicaobserver.com