WE are grateful to banker Dr Ransford Davidson for refocusing attention on past students’ associations in this country.

He is reported in our Saturday edition as telling an Aabuthnott Gallimore High School Alumni Association fund-raiser in St Ann recently that the potential for such groups to advance education is enormous.

“By leveraging your collective skills and influence you can make a lasting impact on the school. The more you collaborate, the more you can drive innovation and build a brighter future for the next generation of students.

“You are uniquely positioned…” Dr Davidson reportedly said.

In fact, that has been the experience of Jamaica’s older, well-resourced traditional schools dating back generations.

Precisely because of the sheer numbers of highly motivated past students with the capacity to organise and raise funds, long-established, highly respected schools are usually far more able to fill resource gaps to ensure success than so-called non-traditional institutions.

It’s no secret that budgetary allocations from Government are never enough to properly meet the pressing needs of schools.

In the case of non-traditional institutions, such as Aabuthnott Gallimore High, the chronic shortage of classrooms, science and computer laboratories, and other crucial facilities is commonplace.

We are told that, as a result of their fund-raising activities, Aabuthnott Gallimore High School Alumni Association recently presented a public address system to the school, located at Armadale, Alexandria, in south-western St Ann. Later this year projects aimed at improving the physical aesthetic of the school plant are expected to reach fruition.

It seems to us, though, that beyond seeking to improve their individual schools, alumni associations could have significant impact by joining hands in a powerful alliance to lobby for much more from Government in the furtherance of education.

For even as competing demands render resource allocation a challenging task, the cynical “run wid it” mentality that invariably takes hold as elections approach undermines sustainable development.

That mentality has ensured that the two-shift system — contemptuously dismissed in folk culture as ‘half-day school’ which was introduced half a century ago as a temporary measure to facilitate school places for all our children — is still with us in 27 schools, at last count.

Even allowing for economic crises down the decades, classrooms required to rid ourselves of the shift system would have been completed a long time ago had ‘run wid it’ not taken pride of place far too often.

Let’s contemplate, for example, the reverse income tax credit scheme which is set to provide $20,000 to registered taxpayers who earn less than $3 million annually. We are told the ‘give back’ to about 500,000 people will cost in excess of $11 billion.

Clearly, that $20,000 will provide a quick, happy bounce for taxpayers, especially those at the lower end of the economic scale.

But we can’t help considering what could be achieved if those billions were used in the construction of classrooms and related facilities for our chronically under-resourced schools.

We believe our alumni associations, speaking with one voice alongside others in the education fraternity, should campaign long, hard, and in unison on issues such as this.

Together they could create a crescendo that none dare ignore.