Acting Chief Education Dr. Kasan Troupe, addressing Parliament's Public Administration and Appropriations Committee on Tuesday (October 12)
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Dr. Kasan Troupe
The Ministry of Education on Tuesday revealed that thousands of students in the public school system remain unaccounted for, 19 months after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted face-to-face classes in Jamaica.
However, the Ministry says the figure has declined when compared to the last academic year as more students are now engaged in online classes.
Acting Chief Education Dr. Kasan Troupe says data submitted by schools to the ministry this month show that 26 per cent of students are still unaccounted for.
"We have now gone into the specific data for the schools and we have identified over 600 of those schools that we are going to be targeting (that) would have indicated that they would have seen a maximum of 60 per cent of their students unaccounted for in some weeks," Dr. Troupe told Tuesday's meeting of Parliament's Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC).
Most of the students who are unaccounted for are registered in schools in Region One, or the Kingston and St. Andrew area.
"We have about 97,000 students in Region One alone. So when you look at numbers, Region One is of concern, but when you look at percentages, we would have seen a maximum of 33 per cent (of students) in any one region being unaccounted for," Dr. Troupe sought to explain.
The Ministry of Education has said by mid-November it will be ready to restart the process of locating students who have not attended classes since the pandemic.
The programme, dubbed the Yard to Yard Finding the Child initiative, will work to find about 25,000 students with whom no contact has been made.
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