A troubling spike in cases, the haphazard cycle of starting and stopping face-to-face classes and the threatened well-being of children are among the reasons some stakeholders in the education sector are now calling for teachers to be prioritised for the COVID-19 vaccine.

Immediate past president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) Owen Speid told the Jamaica Observer that while schools may have all the necessary protocols in place, cases may still pop up because of the uncontrollable happenings in the communities.

“Children are safe when they get into the schools and teachers may be safe when they get into schools. But when you plug in transportation in the whole mix, that is where the problem comes. Children come from all sorts of communities that are exposed to COVID and other diseases. So when you put all of those ills in the communities together, they come to one place and that is at school.

Speid argued that teachers are on the front line and as such, they should also be a priority group.

“The teachers are front line workers and should be given priority treatment if they so desire to. It cannot be mandated that teachers or any other group should take the vaccine. It’s optional in any case. But truth be told, I think it would be good if teachers are a priority group in terms of those who will get the vaccine. But the teachers should reserve that right,” he said.

Jamaica’s COVID-19 cases have now passed 20,000; of that number, 12,781 have recovered and 384 have died.

Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton has said that only front line workers and senior citizens will be the first of the 16 per cent of Jamaicans to be vaccinated by the end of 2021.

But last month, ahead of the current surge in cases, Government Senator Dr Saphire Longmore said teachers and students, especially those sitting examinations this year, should be included among the priority groups to receive the first dosage.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week released a plan detailing how schools could be safely reopened amid the pandemic. The plan recommended the prioritisation of teachers for vaccinations, an expansion of testing surveillance and improving ventilation if possible. However, the CDC said students returning to school were not dependent on those components.

This past weekend the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information said the Ministry of Health and Wellness had conducted tests at Munro College in St Elizabeth between January 18 and February 9, and found that two teachers and 21 students tested positive.

Face-to-face classes were also suspended at York Castle High School in Brown’s Town, St Ann, after a student tested positive last Friday.

Further, making a statement in the House of Representatives late January, Minister of Education Fayval Williams revealed that eight of the 216 schools that were approved for face-to-face classes have been impacted by either suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19.

Citing those cases, president of the National Parent-Teacher Association of Jamaica (NPTAJ) Mitsie Harris-Dillon said Jamaica’s situation is extremely worrisome.

“The Government has not yet identified the cause of the current spread… there is a spike which is quite concerning for us as a stakeholder. We called on the Ministry of Education to work in conjunction with the Ministry of Health to ensure that all education workers and, at least, 50 per cent of our students be tested for COVID before they engage in any form of face-to-face interactions in schools. That has not yet been done. We have had no further word on that,” she said.

“I guess that the challenge is that the Government does not believe they would have sufficient [vaccines] in the initial intake, because the student population alone is over 600,000 in the country. So that is cause for concern as well. We are waiting on the Government to tell us definitively, through the ministries, what it is that they plan to do to address this concern.”

Children’s Advocate Diahann Gordon-Harrison has also weighed in, supporting the push to have teachers vaccinated.

Because teachers are so critical to the education of our youth, Gordon-Harrison said, they should also be prioritised.

“I think that if we’re looking at priority groups, then teachers, certainly, once they’re open to it of course, would be persons who I think would be properly placed on that priority list. It’s either that or we reconsider retooling our education sector so that education and teaching and learning can take place without the face-to-face intervention, depending on how the spike goes.

Added Gordon-Harrison: “Either we put teachers on the priority list so that we can continue with face-to-face, or we scale back on face-to-face and find a way to make those connections with children who are not in the day-to-day classroom.”

Another benchmark would be to hire more teachers, so students could be stretched out to avoid clusters. But Gordon-Harrison questioned whether that is realistic in a Jamaican context.

“We can hardly pay the teachers who we presently have. I’m not sure if that is an undertaking that would be feasible in our context. It sounds interesting though…I wouldn’t want to knock it down, but I’m not sure how feasible it would be in our current situation.”

Speid agreed saying: “We have a teacher shortage in many areas in Jamaica. We are not able to find adequate numbers of teachers in particular subject areas, and so that is the challenge.”