JAMAICA has become highly effective at responding to disasters but continues to fail at preparing for them, according to educator Dr Deon Edwards-Kerr, who warned that the country is trapped in a cycle of crisis management rather than true resilience.

Edwards-Kerr, who is dean of the Faculty of Education and Humanities at The University of the West Indies, Mona, was speaking Monday at a Jamaica Teachers’ Association press forum on disaster risk management and recovery in education.

She said the country’s approach to education recovery remains largely reactive despite years of warnings from experts and policymakers.

“I would say response is not resilience. Resilience is creating the systems that we need to be able to anticipate disruption,” Edwards-Kerr said.

Her remarks come as the education sector continues to grapple with the lingering effects of three major disruptions in six years — the COVID-19 pandemic, Hurricane Beryl in 2024, and Hurricane Melissa that ravaged sections of the island on October 28, 2025.

Rather than viewing those events as separate crises, Edwards-Kerr argued that they should be understood as a single, compounded challenge that has repeatedly struck an already weakened system.

“I am not here to talk about three crises that happened to Jamaica’s education system one after the other. I am here to see if we can understand what happens when a system absorbs the first blow before it has recovered from the previous one and then absorbs a third,” she said.

“Between 2020 and 2026, Jamaica’s national standard curriculum, which is the framework through which our children are prepared to become citizens and productive workers, was disrupted by COVID-19, Hurricane Beryl and Hurricane Melissa. Each arrived before the damage of the previous crisis had been repaired. The result is not a series of setbacks, it is a structural condition,” she added.

She acknowledged that the Government, educators and international partners had often performed admirably under difficult circumstances. Following Hurricane Melissa, for example, thousands of modified curriculum guides, workbooks and literacy materials were distributed to affected schools, while temporary classrooms, Starlink Internet systems and psychosocial support programmes helped keep students connected to learning.

However, she argued that those measures, while necessary, were largely emergency interventions that should not be mistaken for long-term resilience.

“The responses were inadequate in crisis anticipation. They did not build the pre-positioned systems. We have not done that — the infrastructure, the protocols, and the professional competencies that would reduce the severity of disruption when the next crisis exists,” she said.

Among the vulnerabilities exposed by the crises, she said, were weaknesses in both physical and digital infrastructure.

She noted that during the pandemic, approximately 120,000 Jamaican children became disengaged from learning because of inadequate Internet access, lack of devices, and limited connectivity.

Those challenges had not been fully resolved before Hurricane Beryl struck, followed by Hurricane Melissa, which damaged or destroyed more than 600 educational institutions and disrupted learning for roughly 150,000 students.

She also pointed to what she described as a failure to implement recommendations made years ago. The Jamaica Education Transformation Commission, established in the aftermath of COVID-19, had recommended incorporating disaster preparedness, climate adaptation and psychosocial resilience into the curriculum. According to Edwards-Kerr, those recommendations remained largely unfulfilled when Hurricane Melissa struck.

She also raised concerns about what she called institutional failures, arguing that innovations introduced during previous crises were not adequately expanded or embedded within the education system, and with the Atlantic hurricane season already under way, Edwards-Kerr warned that Jamaica remains vulnerable to another major disruption before fully recovering from previous ones.

“So the point is Jamaica has reactive competence, but not the proactive resilience and we need to close the gap,” she said.