The Minister found the cameras before he found the principals, and a decent idea is now paying for a careless rollout.
Opinion · Sans Humbug
Free is a big word. Read the whole sentence.
The Minister found the cameras before he found the principals, and a decent idea is now paying for a careless rollout.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to lower the cost of sending a child to school. Let me put that up front, because what follows will read like criticism, and it is, but not of the aim. Easing the squeeze on parents in July is a decent instinct. The trouble with the Ministry of Education’s registration-fee announcement is not the heart of it. It is nearly everything around it.
Start with the word doing the heavy lifting: free. Tuition at our public and assisted schools has been free by law since 2006. Section 16 of the Education Act said so long before this administration, this Minister, or this circular. So when the message reaching parents is that school is now free, understand what actually moved. A handful of registration-stage charges came off for new first formers. The badge, the tie, the PTA fee and the PE uniform stayed exactly where they were. Free is a big word. The sentence it sits in is longer than the headline.
Then there is the rollout, which is where a good idea went to get roughed up. The announcement landed on a Tuesday. One school registered its new students that same Tuesday. Another was set to register two days later. Which means parents paid the old fees, children signed up for clubs, and only afterward did the word come down that some of that money now has to be handed back. To his credit, the Minister said he takes responsibility for the timing. I will give him that. But owning a mess in public is not the same as sparing people the mess in the first place. You do not need a degree in administration to know that you talk to the schools before you talk to the cameras.
You fund what you defund, or you have not saved anyone a cent. You have only moved the bill.
That is the question nobody in a suit has answered. If you take away the fees a school was quietly running on, what replaces the money? The Ministry’s own circular does not hide from it. It asks principals to pursue innovative and sustainable approaches to revenue generation. Read that again. That is the government removing a school’s income and, in the same breath, telling the school to go and find income. That is not relief. That is a hot potato with a ribbon on it.
Which brings me to the part of this story that should trouble us more than any gate pass or games bag. A principal has said, publicly, that his school received no supplies from the Ministry this year, and that he has been reaching into his own pocket to keep the doors open. I am not going to call that proven from a screenshot, and neither should you. But it is a serious claim from a serious person, and the Ministry owes the country a straight answer. If a principal is buying chalk with his salary while a Minister collects applause online, then we are arguing about the wrong thing.
Let me be even handed, because Sans Humbug cuts both ways. Some of the loudest voices in this quarrel are not disinterested. The praise often arrives wearing one party’s jersey and the condemnation the other’s. That is our politics, and you should discount both accordingly. But a careless rollout does not become tidy because your side ran it, and a fair point does not become false because your opponent made it. Take the jerseys off and the facts left standing are plain: the timing was poor, the consultation was thin, and the funding question is wide open.
None of this is fatal. It is fixable, and quickly. Sequence the announcement after the conversation, not before it. Tell parents plainly what stayed and what went, in one sentence, without the fanfare. And put real money behind the schools you have just relieved of their fees, so that what looks like generosity in July does not harden into a shortage in September.
The measure of this policy will not be the likes it collected this week. It will be whether Central Leeward has what it needs when the bell rings for the new term. That is the fine print. Read the whole sentence.
Sans Humbug is an opinion column. The views expressed are the writer’s own. The Ministry of Education is welcome to a right of reply.
Filed under: Opinion, Sans Humbug, Education · Tags: Sans Humbug, school fees, Phillip Jackson, Education Act, NDP, registration fees, principals, education policy