THOUSANDS of Jamaican students will today begin summer school under the Ministry of Education’s Recover Smarter – National School Learning and Intervention Plan (NSLIP).

According to acting chief education officer in the Ministry of Education, Youth and Information, Dr Kasan Troupe, approximately 17,000 students and 3,000 teachers have indicated interest in the national summer school initiative.

Troupe said the students were referred to the summer programme by teachers and, “they [teachers] are working with us and we are now organising for the timetables, because the data changes by the minute. This morning [last Wednesday], we started out with approximately 9,000 students on the platform and by 4 pm we saw approximately 17,000 students on the platform registered for the programme”, she said.

With the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) not enthused by the State-sponsored summer school, Troupe declared that the initiative is based on research and guidance from international consultants.

“We have seen what is being done in the international arena. We have our international consultants who have been working with us and guiding us, and so that is why the intervention is built on academic support, psychosocial support and of course, a complete section focused on locating [and] re-engaging our students,” declared Troupe..

The summer school programme forms part of the Government’s ‘Recover Smarter-National School Learning and Intervention Plan’ which is aimed at helping students recover from learning loss due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The summer school sessions will be held for approximately two hours each day, Monday to Thursday, from today until August 19. They will be delivered in online and face-to-face components, with the latter targeted at students who have not been consistently engaged with the education system because of the pandemic.

National mathematics coordinator, Dr Tamika Benjamin told a town hall meeting hosted by the education ministry last week to discuss plans for NSLIP, that the initiative was developed using the appropriate research.

“[The research involved] pulling on all the technical expertise in the ministry and engaging a number of stakeholders across the sector to fine-tune it [and] to ensure that the plan that would be implemented would meet the needs of our students,” said Benjamin.

She added that there is, “a plan that’s outlined to ensure we identify where every single Jamaican child is and [that] we develop and implement programmes that are designed to meet their unique needs. Each child has had a different experience over the last 16 months. It’s important for us to ensure that we are catering to each child’s needs”.

In the meantime, Minister of Education Fayval Williams said that students will be able to access lessons focused on core subject areas such as mathematics, English language, social studies and science.

“For the online we have our service providers. We have LearningHub, we have EduFocal and we have One-n-One Educational Limited… We will make it available to the students on a self-directed basis for other hours of the day – that means they can log on and still have access,” said Williams.

“Having gone 16 months of living with the [novel coronavirus] pandemic I know our students would have been suffering some amount of learning loss during that process. They were not in the familiar setting that they were used to – they had to be online, sometimes they were not able to get on for whatever reason. And so, we have put in place additional programmes that will help them to recover what it is they would’ve lost and to take them beyond where they were when we started out in the pandemic,” added Williams.