Jasper Lawrence

Tyrone Reid, Enterprise Reporter

High schools across the island are owed millions of dollars in outstanding school fees because some parents say they cannot afford to pay.

More than 60 per cent of the approximately 200,000 students in these schools either paid a part of the fee or none at all between 2002 and 2004. An opinion poll commissioned by The Gleaner Company revealed Friday that a fifth of Jamaican parents say they cannot afford to send their children to school during the academic year beginning tomorrow.

Under the Government's cost-sharing programme, parents are required to pay 50 per cent of their children's school fee and the state the other half. But data from the Ministry of Education revealed that for the 2002/2003 and the 2003/2004 school years, the fees for more than 41,000 of the 200,000 students were not paid.

The schools also had to get by with only partial payment of the fees for more than 172,000 students over the two years. In contrast, more than 150,000 students' tuition fees were paid in full over the same period.

unable to collect

The trend in the payments was gleaned through the Access to Information (ATI) Act.

The Ministry of Education has acknowledged that the schools are still unable to collect all the tuition fees.

"Yes, the schools face a challenge in collecting fees from parents," said Jasper Lawrence, newly-installed chief education officer. "... It happens, principals report instances of that."

He explained that the rate of compliance varied from school to school, pointing out that the schools which are located in some deep rural areas or in certain inner-city communities usually recorded the lowest levels of compliance.

Mr. Lawrence told The Sunday Gleaner that the non-payment posed a serious problem to the efficient running of the schools, as the funds are used to finance the day-to-day operations of the institutions.

"Sometimes schools find themselves in dire straits and have to rock back on the ministry," he said. Statistics for the academic year, September 2002-June 2003 cover all 155 high schools on the island. The information for 2003/2004 represented 130 schools because 25 institutions failed to return requested data.

The document, supplied by the Education Ministry, further showed that parents' contribution in both academic years accounted for less than half of what the schools projected to collect in tuition fees.

However, Mr. Lawrence said that there has been some level of improvement since the government started to pay 50 per cent of every high school students' school fee. It cost the government $731 million to finance this upgraded version of its cost-sharing programme, which began in 1994.

Up to September 2005, parents were required to apply for assistance. That has been changed, with the assistance being extended to all students at the secondary level.

Mr. Lawrence said that the schools are trying to collect tuition fees, noting that principals have established lay-away plans with several parents. "Where parents cannot afford to pay the full fee at once, they can go in and arrange with the principal how to pay over a period of time," he said. "Many principals have been doing that."

Last week, Christopher Tufton, president of Generation 2000 (G2K), an affiliate of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), restated the Opposition's call to have cost-sharing removed and replaced with free education up to the secondary level.

He argued that it would cost the government an estimated $1 billion more to the education budget to eliminate cost-sharing. This, he said would be more than attainable if the ruling People's National Party (PNP) did not renege on its commitment to increase the education allocation to 15 per cent of the national budget.

Education budget

The current education budget is $35.1 billion, or 11.2 per cent of total national expenditure budgeted for the financial year 2006-2007 (Estimates of expenditure 2006).

Dr. Tufton pledged that cost-sharing would be a thing of the past, if the JLP were elected to form the next government.

He argued that cost-sharing is preventing children from receiving a good education. "This situation is forcing many parents into the unacceptable choice of deciding which child to send to school or which to leave at home," Dr. Tufton said.