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USAID Information:
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Jamaica
Aid to Schools Helps Children Read, Develop
The following is reprinted from Frontlines,
December 2005 issue.
ST. JAMES, Jamaica—Salt Marsh Primary
School is the pride and joy of this community,
some 10 miles from Montego Bay,
since its third graders dramatically improved
their reading skills over the past year.
More than 80 percent of its third-grade
students scored above Jamaica’s mastery
level, compared to only 54 percent during
the 2003–04 school year. The increase comes
two years into the school’s participation
in the USAID-funded Caribbean Center of
Excellence for Teacher Training (C-CETT)
project, a regional Bush administration initiative
started in 2001.
“We never had this abundance of books
before or the audio-video aids, and we never
had a reading specialist at hand,” said Fay
Davy, Salt Marsh’s acting principal.
 C-CETT,
which aims to improve the reading skills of first to third
graders, works with 42 other Jamaican schools and a total
of 768 other primary schools throughout seven Caribbean nations.
At Salt Marsh, the project provided funds
to start a reading room where teachers could
spend more time with slow readers. The
school instituted a reading week. Teachers
were sent to seminars and workshops where
they learned new techniques aimed at
improving students’ reading skills. And the
school has its own reading specialist, who
serves as coach and mentor to the teachers.
Alethia Samuels, second-grade teacher at
Salt Marsh, said: “I had some really mischievous
children in grade two, but I think
the reading really helped change them a lot,
especially the boys. Every morning now they
are unpacking their reading books before
class starts.”
From training seminars, Samuels learned
how to pair up slow readers with advanced
students who could help their friends.
“Now I have to call on them to find out if
they are in the class,” Samuels says, “they are
so quiet and focused on their books.”
Some 14 percent of girls and 26 percent of
boys in Jamaica are illiterate. About 142,000
youths—mostly boys—are out of school and
unemployed.
Jamaican Minister of National Security
Peter Phillips has said that many petty criminals
are young unemployed men, citing a
study showing that 75 percent of perpetrators
of violent crime are in the 15–29 age group.
“Boys’ underachievement at all levels of the
education system is problematic,” said Claire
Spence, USAID education officer. “With
Jamaica’s homicide rate being third highest
in the world in 2003, the Jamaican education
system must help address the problem
of youth violence and develop socially and
emotionally well-adjusted children.”
USAID is spending $5 million this year
to improve education in Jamaica through
various projects.
For example, the Agency invested
$300,000 through a public-private alliance
project called I-PLEDGE to print new, multicolor
English books for grades four through
six. Last year, it supported printing new math
books for grades one through five.
“The printers were never paid on time,
so the books were always late,” said Aldith
McDaniel Jones, principal at Kingston’s
Rousseau Primary School, attended by some
1,240 children. “But this year we got our
books well in time, a week before classes
began.”
“The books were very well received,” she
said. “The first thing that the kids tell you
is that the color makes a big difference. It
makes it all come alive.”
Jamaican youth drop out of the formal
school system because they cannot afford
transportation to school or lunch, have lost
interest in education, or lack sufficient parenting,
educators say. These factors have
led to a high number of youth living a street
life. And a mushrooming number of informal
schools run by NGOs and faith-based organizations
have opened their doors to reach
out to them.
At one such school, St. Margaret’s
Resource Center in inner-city Kingston, 370
students up to age 18 spend their days in
class, remedial workshops, and vocational
training.
“The profile of the youngsters here varies.
They might have been in school and dropped
out; they might have never been in school,
or been kicked out,” said Suzanne Smith,
the center’s acting principal. “Many of them
were just lost in the system.”
St. Margaret’s is one of a handful of
informal schools that USAID supports
through its Uplifting Adolescents Program.
The Agency is working with an umbrella
organization of 25 groups targeting primarily
inner cities throughout eastern Jamaica to
pluck children from the street and arm them
with enhanced educational and vocational
skills.
“There are many factors like the violence
element, lack of parenting, or they just can’t
afford the school materials,” Smith said. “We
offer them breakfast and lunch programs,
and sometimes they don’t want to go home
because they might not have that there.”
St. Margaret’s operates in three shifts and
adjusts its schedule on Fridays to accommodate
some students who must stay home and
help their parents work the farm or sell at the
market that day.
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