DECLARING that Jamaica is facing an “education emergency”, president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) La Sonja Harrison is urging the Government to implement a five-year national learning recovery and acceleration plan to tackle the existing gaps in the sector.

But Harrison is adamant that the five-year initiative must put educators at the forefront of the conversation.

“If it is as educators, we are the first responders, we are the people on the ground, I am saying that there can be no conversation about how we go nationally without the teachers in a meaningful way. And I’m not talking about us, leaders of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association, I’m talking about the people who are on the ground, the foot soldiers, and the people on whom you will depend [on] anyway to carry out whatever vision you have for education.

“Those persons need to be invited at the table from the beginning of the conversation, not at the tail end,” Harrison told the Jamaica Observer on Thursday following a meeting of the Rotary club of Kingston at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel.

“We have TREND [Transforming Education for National Development], and we have ETOC [Education Transformation Oversight Committee], because they continue to update the nation quarterly concerning same. So ETOC will have some educators represented there, but is it reflective of the system, the people who work in the trenches of the system, and are they at the table for the conversation and posit the solutions that they would see ideal and realistic, in transforming the education system?”Harrison questioned.

In her presentation Harrison highlighted several disruptions faced by the education sector and argued that the urgency displayed by the Government in rebuilding structures and restoring operations has not been given to recovering learning.

President of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association La Sonja Harrison (left) shares greetings with Carolyn Gardner, president of the Rotary Club of Kingston. (Garfield Robinson)

“COVID-19 interrupted the education system of an entire generation. Then came Hurricane Beryl [July 2024], Hurricane Melissa [October 2025]. In between, there have been floods…fires, infrastructural failures, and teacher shortages, and that is just since 2019, we have not even gone back decades,”

“We have spent considerable time recovering buildings, and those recovery of buildings have certainly not been to the standard that we are desirous of, and the pace, the alacrity. Because for us to be able to report as a nation that 40 of some 600 plus schools have been rebuilt, that’s 6.67 per cent of our schools that have been retrofitted to provide an atmosphere for safe, comfortable learning of our children,” Harrison frowned.

Pointing to the Government’s emergencies in education plan, including the modification of objectives from the National Standards Curriculum, (NSC) post-Hurricane Melissa, Harrison charged that establishing such a plan after a disaster is ineffective.

“We need to identify those who have fallen behind. We need targeted initiatives. We need additional instructional support where necessary. We need stronger literacy and numeracy initiative benchmarks to support. We need trained teachers and interventionists at varying levels of the system. And we need to measure whether children are actually catching up. Attendance is not recovery. Promotion is not recovery. Completing a grade is not recovery. Learning is recovery. Teachers cannot be expected to recover six years of educational disruption with the same resources, same staffing, and in some cases under staffing, and after these weather challenges and with worsening infrastructure,” said Harrison.

“The Government is going to tell you that we have the emergency in education stuff, but it has to be proactive in nature. It can’t be that it is when the event happens, then we come up with something that will help to take us through another event. So we have to sit down and look and say how are we going to, one, ensure learning, how are we going to engage teachers, how are we going to engage parents.

“Jamaica needs a national foundational learning emergency plan. I deliberately use that language. Not another programme project to treat with the illiteracy problem. Not another intervention to treat with learning gap, as this is just not another education challenge. It is an emergency. Because when children are progressing through our schools without mastering reading, comprehension, writing, and numeracy, we’re not simply dealing with an academic problem. We’re compromising Jamaica’s future,” Harrison charged.