Dear Editor,

The suggestion by Jamaica Teachers’ Association President La Sonja Harrison that Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH) benefits should be tied to parents’ attendance at parent-teacher association (PTA) meetings is an ill-conceived response to a legitimate concern. It mistakes punishment for policy and risks making vulnerable children bear the consequences of parental disengagement.

There is no dispute that Jamaica needs greater parental involvement in education. Parents must show up, communicate with teachers, and accept responsibility for their children’s development. But complex challenges cannot be answered with simplistic remedies. Leadership is measured not by the severity of the sanction proposed, but by the wisdom, fairness, and effectiveness of the solution advanced.

Withholding PATH benefits from vulnerable children does not merely fail that test, it fundamentally contradicts the very purpose of social protection.

PATH exists precisely because poverty creates barriers to education, health, and opportunity. Approximately 350,000 Jamaicans benefit from the programme, and importantly, PATH is already conditional. School-age children six years and older must maintain an attendance rate of not less than 85 per cent, while children under six must comply with the schedule of preventive health visits established by the Ministry of Health. These requirements are deliberately tied to the programme’s developmental objectives.

That distinction is critical. If a child is attending school and satisfying PATH’s educational conditionality, what rational policy objective is achieved by making a parent’s attendance at PTA meetings another basis on which that assistance could be withheld?

The proposal becomes even more troubling when considered against the lived realities of working-class Jamaicans. A hotel worker who cannot abandon a shift, a security guard returning home after a long night, a domestic worker whose employer refuses to grant time off, or a single parent forced to choose between attending a meeting and earning a day’s wages should not be casually branded irresponsible. Without proper regard for individual circumstances, absence from a PTA meeting is neither a fair nor reliable measure of parental commitment.

When parental neglect genuinely exists, confront the neglect. But do so with measures directed at the parent and capable of changing the behaviour. Reducing the resources available to an already vulnerable household neither establishes responsibility nor guarantees engagement.

PATH is a social protection programme, not a disciplinary mechanism. Its conditionalities are connected to the health, education, and development of its beneficiaries. Extending them to PTA attendance would, therefore, represent more than another condition, it would alter the logic of the programme by turning a developmental safety net into an instrument of coercion.

And that creates a troubling precedent. If access to social assistance can be conditioned on obligations beyond the developmental purposes for which PATH was established, where does that principle end? Today, PTA meetings; tomorrow, perhaps another civic or parental obligation. Social protection should not become an all-purpose enforcement mechanism simply because its withdrawal provides leverage over those who depend on it.

The JTA should be leading the conversation towards solutions that address parental disengagement directly through flexible PTA arrangements, virtual participation when practical, targeted intervention with persistently disengaged parents, counselling, and stronger home-school partnerships. Such measures preserve accountability while recognising the difference between unwillingness to participate and an inability to do so.

We must demand greater responsibility from parents, but accountability must be rational, proportionate, and directed at the behaviour we are seeking to change.

Education policy should expand opportunity, not weaponise vulnerability. The JTA president has identified a legitimate problem, but the proposed remedy lacks the depth and maturity that such a complex social issue demands. For these cogent reasons, unless a compelling evidential and policy basis can be demonstrated otherwise, the proposal should be rejected as a fallacious policy argument as it assumes that economic sanction will produce parental engagement without establishing that the proposed sanction will actually remedy the behaviour it seeks to change.

We cannot strengthen a child’s education by weakening the very safety net intended to help that child overcome disadvantage. Parental responsibility must be strengthened and parental neglect confronted, but taking away a benefit intended to protect a vulnerable child is a misplaced response to the shortcomings of an adult. Such an approach does not advance the cause of education; it simply directs the consequence towards those least responsible and most in need of protection.

Nashu Lelievre

Board chairman, Barracks Road Primary School