Poor attendance continues to affect some schools in St Thomas, Portland and St Mary where administrators say they have been employing various strategies to encourage students to attend for an entire week.

Acting principal of Port Maria Primary Carla Ruddock said they have noticed a decline in attendance for students on the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH). As such, the school will implement a breakfast programme in September to boost attendance.

“Coming out of the guidance counsellors’ report we realised that these children tend to be absent because at times they don’t have meals to come to school,” she explained.

Of the 967 students enrolled at the school some 50 per cent of them are said to be on PATH. According to Ruddock, majority of the students are from communities in and around Port Maria, therefore transportation cost is not an issue.

“Many of them walk to school, so that’s not a main factor, so it mostly boils down to meals. So we are trying to see how best we can address that by putting on a breakfast programme and then we will assess and see the overall impact that will have on attendance, she reiterated.

Senior teacher at Buff Bay Primary Frank Peart said a combination of meals and transportation cost act as an inhibitor to regular attendance at that school in Portland.

“This is a complex situation because we have five schools literally in the Buff Bay community with children coming from miles away, he said. “We had the grade four literacy and numeracy test and although we have been preaching it everyday that the exams are on those days we still took the time to call the parents to remind them, especially if the child was missing from school through that last week before exam, but still there are those who do not attend.”

Peart cited an instance when the school had to surpass certain social hurdles to get a child to sit her exams despite repeated efforts to ensure she would be present.

“The child was living with the father and it took one hurdle to get to him because we had to call a friend who knows a friend to get to the parent, and one of the time the mother wanted to give me the babymother’s number where the child is but she was afraid. So I said: “Is your child, so go for her because the exam start,” he recounted.

He explained that when a child is absent for more than three days the guidance counsellor does home visits or contacts the parents to find out what is happening.

“Each teacher tends to be responsive in that if the child is missing too often they will also call and find out what is going on, he explained.

Peart said sometimes the parents come up with various excuses as to why the child is unable to attend school.

“Sometimes it is that a child doesn’t have shoes, and although we have those school shoes from Food For the Poor the parents want to buy a particular one, and so they stop the child from coming to school because of that, he said.

According to Peart, the school provides a breakfast programme for children whose parents are having difficulty with lunch. However, this does not always address the problem of poor attendance in some cases.

“One lady took her child to the school, had breakfast for both of them and then proceeded to leave. When the guidance counsellor called her and asked what is going on the mother said ‘the child not coming to school today’…the guidance counsellor had to sit them down and explain to them that this is to help the child to be at school that day.

Newly appointed acting principal at Robert Lightbourne High School Alfred Thomas said although the attendance rate has since moved from 61 per cent to 71 per cent, there is still a challenge in getting more students to attend a full week of school.

“I have had discussions with my colleagues in St Thomas, and other than Morant Bay High, all the other schools are having a challenge with attendance and it gets critical on a Friday, he explained.

Thomas said they are working hard to dispel the notion that attendance at school on a Friday is not important. “At times you do a check and you don’t have 50 per cent of the students attending school. It is a mindset and I think it is something all of us have to deal with,” he said.

With a new Ministry of Education initiative for a partnership between Robert Lightbourne, Paul Bogle, and Seaforth High schools Thomas said a major thrust is to establish a committee comprising guidance counsellors, deans of discipline and student leaders from the respective schools to examine the issue.

“They have met already and one of the things they looked at is that a lot of the disciplinary challenges that are taking place in the school are coming from selected communities, and so they are planning to have town hall meetings in these communities to address it,” he explained.

According to Thomas, there are some Fridays where all that can be done is revision because some classes have to be merged.

Each of the class has 40 or 50 per cent attendants and so you can’t teach any topic on a Friday because half of the class is missing, he said.

Thomas said the guidance counsellors who were doing home visits once per week have since requested an additional day because of the number of cases.

While some children are being stopped from school to help in the field or at the market he said that is not always the case as some of them just do not believe in attending on a Friday.

“The reality is that not all of them are going to market because there is some of them that I have to stop when I am going to school and take them home and say ‘today is a school day, what is happening?’ and so it’s just the mentality that Friday is not a school day, he explained.

In a bid to address the chronic problem Thomas said the school has increased the number of days it provides PATH lunch to students from three to four because 80 per cent of the student population is said to be on some kind of welfare programme.

“We have 75 per cent of our students on the PATH, and we have to add other students who are not on it to what we call a welfare programme. These students are not on the PATH, but their needs are as critical as those who are on it, he said.

Meanwhile, the principal said the value on education is just not there. “When I went there and a teacher requested a camp (to be held overnight) I said, ‘why do you need a camp during exam time?’ and he said ‘that is the only way we are going to guarantee that these students do the exam, because if we don’t have them here they may not turn up to sit the exam.’

According to Thomas, this is not a fancy camp but just a place to host the students at school and provide them with meals. “It is simply to ensure they leave from the area they are camping to the exam room because if they are home with their parents it is no guarantee they are going to come to do the exam, he said.

Yasheika Blackwood-Grant, education officer with responsibility for region two, said the ministry does not have a specific programme to address poor attendance in these schools. However, in schools that have a history of poor attendance, she said, the guidance unit at the ministry works with these guidance counsellors.

She further explained that the education ministry monitors the attendance of students nationally to identify schools where attendance falls below 85 per cent.

“In our region (North East), though the standard is 85 per cent because of our unique situations, there are some areas that we don’t get very targeted unless they fall below 80 per cent, which means that one in five students will be out, she explained.

Blackwood-Grant said proactive leaders in these schools make an effort to boost attendance and she cited Islington and Broomerville High schools as examples of this.

“You used to go to Islington and there were almost no students because they came in as they pleased. They were on a shift system and by the time they got there school was almost finished. They could just leave as they please, nothing much was going on. With the changes the school has managed to implement, students have started to come and so when we raise the standards in our schools, attendance is one of those things that increases,” she said.