JAMAICA Teachers’ Association president-elect candidate for 2024-2025 Dorain Allen-Rainford is on the warpath to see the recommendations for incentives for teachers contained in the 2021 report of the Orlando Patterson-led Jamaica Education Transformation Commission implemented.

Launching her campaign at the Wolmer’s Boys’ School in the Corporate Area recently, Allen-Rainford, a classroom teacher for over 25 years, said “among the first things I must do is agitate for better wages, better fringe benefits and better working conditions. We have been in the doldrums for too long”.

“Time come where we must take our place in society, where we must be paid our worth, where we must get our benefits that we deserve. When we have satisfied teachers, we will have students who will learn and take their place in society,” Allen-Rainford said.

Noting that recommendations for graduate teachers to receive a gross salary of $3 million yearly is yet to materialise in the nearly three years since the report was released, Allen-Rainford, a classroom teacher at the Convent of Mercy Academy in Kingston, said, “graduate trained teachers, since that time, have lost some $10 billion in fringe benefits and salaries that they would have enjoyed before this last negotiation period”.

“All amenities have increased and our salaries have only increase by a pittance; a taxi driver works more than a teacher, and when I compare what is happening to our counterparts in other Caribbean counties, we are almost at the bottom in terms of remuneration as we are not being paid our worth,” Allen-Rainford, who has held several posts in the JTA and is a graduate trained teacher with a Master’s in Human Resource Development and a degree in the Pure and Applied Sciences, declared.

A president-elect is chosen annually and serves for a year in that position before assuming the office of president. An election among declared candidates, following a period of nominations, usually occurs in June every year and all full, life, and retired members of the JTA are entitled to cast their vote for the candidate of their choice by secret ballot.

Allen-Rainford, in launching her manifesto, said, “My vision for the teachers of this country is to empower them and to see them paid based on their worth and value. I want to see a halt in the brain drain, a halt in the migration, and it will only happen when our teachers are valued, paid their worth and respected.”

The Patterson report, among other things, said “in the Jamaican context, consideration should be given to promotion-based incentives for teachers who engage in activities that enhance the education sector, eg in active research, and who have their findings published and utilised in the sector”.

It also said, “These teachers, who are willing to move beyond the accepted boundaries, should be afforded the opportunity to become senior teachers of research, for example, and assist the principal in the monitoring and mentoring of inexperienced teachers,” adding that performance incentives should also be considered.

“The mechanism would consider teacher performance based on relative improvements in student/classroom performance, rather than performance in absolute terms. This would avoid disincentivising teaching disadvantaged students. The metrics would have to be carefully worked out and agreed upon by all stakeholders. Such a strategy has the potential to retain the best teachers in the classroom and motivate excellence in teaching,” it said further.