In making his contribution to Parliament’s Standing Finance Committee last week, Education Minister the Reverend Ronnie Thwaites said that spending on children’s education “must come before the nails, before the hairpiece, before the rum, before the cigarette”.

For the record, Mr Minister, there is absolutely no need to ask parliamentarians to join hands and send a strong message to parents that they must invest in the education of their children, nor is it required for you to tell us how to prioritise the limited funds we have. On this, our parents don’t need a lecture from the minister of education.

Section 28 (1) of the Child Care and Protection Act states that “every person having custody, charge or care of a child between the ages of 4 and 16 years shall take such steps as are necessary to ensure that the child is enrolled at, and attends school.”

While the law makes it mandatory for children to attend school, there is no mechanism in place to ensure compliance. Your job, sir, is to start making school an easier place to come to.

Your job is to assign truancy officers to the street corners where the very young boys hang out in traffic and beg for money instead of being in school. When they ask me for a lunch money and in return I ask them why they’re not in school, invariably they give me one of two responses: They are either on the shift system, or they don’t have shoes.

I say if a child wants to go to school and the parent cannot or will not afford it, there needs to be a classroom seat for that child. Please don’t send a child home if he doesn’t have the right shoes or any shoes at all.

This week I am especially sensitive to the shoe issue because my child was told in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t be allowed to take school photographs unless he wore a better pair of school shoes the next day. Clearly, there is a problem if the powers that be think that new shoes are required for a head shot. But I digress…

How our parents spend their money might not be the root cause of children not attending school. The Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions indicated that the main reasons given by parents/guardians for non-attendance of children for some or all days were “running errands” (40.2 per cent), “illness” (30.3 per cent) and “money problem” (17.8 per cent). This is a departure from previous findings which indicated the lack of finance as the primary reason.

To this end, the survey recommends that more public education is required to convince parents/guardians of the importance of education as a vehicle for social mobility, and more follow-up of children not attending schools needs to be done by the relevant authorities.

For the record, parents spend far more than the amounts required for tuition, lunch money, transportation, auxiliary fees and the like; they spend billions on fees for extra lessons because of what they perceive to be lacking in the education system.

Due to large classes, overburdened teachers, perennial lack of resources and educational tools, in 2009 alone expenditure on extra lessons went up by 24.8 per cent.

In addition to the weekday classes, the school curriculum has evolved to demand extra lessons throughout the week and on weekends too, which must also be paid for if children are to do well in their GSAT, CSEC and other higher-level exams.

The general expectation is that schools would provide a satisfactory standard of education; if this is met it makes it unnecessary for children to have a need for extra lessons. Nevertheless, the Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions also found that households continue to pay more for extra lessons than they did for tuition and fees, with the annual average expenditure for extra lessons at the primary level being $10,880.35 and $11,383.83 for children at the secondary level.

The minister said while Government has a responsibility to provide resources for the education of the nation’s children, parents have an equal responsibility. We agree, but it appears that our responsibility is to come up with the extra cash to pay for the extra lessons that our children so badly need, which we do ” …before the nails, before the hairpiece, before the rum, before the cigarette”. We do that, Mr Minister.

So don’t begrudge us our lipstick or pedicures, Mr Minister. Let us have our wigs and white rum. Those are the diversions that keep us on this side of sanity when we question having to pay twice for our children’s education.

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