IT may just be her appearance but Education Minister Fayval Williams comes across as too cool as she addresses the emerging crisis of teachers migrating from the Jamaican school system.

Saying everything is “under control” in the face of the growing number of teachers fleeing the classroom — 400 this year already, according to the Jamaica Teachers’ Association — suggests that she is merely trying not to cause panic in the country.

But the panic will come when children go home next week, and the following weeks, and tell their parents that they have no teachers at school. One of the places we are losing teachers to the United States, where some schools have cut classes to three days a week. Hopefully we’ll not come to that.

Mrs Williams told journalists that 167 teachers had migrated recently and added: “Of course, we are still getting information from our school principals and, so this number [167] could change as we move towards the end of August and into September. The new school year begins on the fifth of September and even up to that time there may be resignations.”

Let’s not fool ourselves, the education minister is not to be blamed for the problem. She has little or no control over which teacher is going to migrate or who is going to stay. The Opposition pretends not to know this, but they do.

As they have done with our nurses, the rich countries — mainly the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom — are recruiting our teachers in increasing numbers, knowing full well that Jamaica cannot compete with their levels of resources and ability to throw money at them.

Add to that the fact that our people have this historical propensity to want to migrate to these countries in search of greener pastures — or the perception of it. Indeed, Mrs Williams is correct when she says, “Teachers, like everyone else, make very personal decisions to migrate, and we are sorry to see them go, but we respect their decisions…”

In the past when we have addressed such matters in this space, our position has been that Jamaica should grasp the opportunity presented by this adversity and factor in the inevitable loss of nurses and teachers in the training programmes. It would certainly help to reduce our unemployment numbers.

We should brace for the worst because of the heavy loss of teachers from schools in America, especially. One credible estimate suggested that more than 300,000 teachers are now needed.

There was a time when the prime minister of Jamaica could appeal to the patriotism of Jamaicans and beg them not to leave us in a lurch. Now, the first response to such a request is likely to be: “Patriotism can’t go to supermarket.”

Having said all that, we would caution those considering migration to foreign classrooms that all is not hunky-dory, to use the American phrase. We recall that in the early days of major migration by nurses, many of them found that they were placed in dreadful conditions.

Many, even senior nurses, were assigned to the hospital wards handling hundreds of AIDS patients or placed in hospices to care for dying AIDS patients. Many teachers who migrated likewise found themselves in the worst schools with almost unteachable children shunned by American teachers.

All that glitters is not gold.