There exists a well-intentioned but onerous and far from efficient arrangement that allows for children attending state schools to benefit from textbooks loaned from the Ministry of Education. Every year, without exception, issues arise at several schools in relation to the efficient rollover of books, from one set of children to another. The issues range from students’ failure to meet timelines in the return of books to internal glitches in schools’ distribution system.
Sometimes, students’ failure to return books or high level of book abuse means that there are not sufficient books to go around in the new academic year. In such cases, books are distributed, we understand on a first come, first served basis. There have also been cases in which the ministry’s book distribution unit complained that some of the administrative regions either submit their book request late or do not provide information on the correct amount of books needed.
There have been cases in which children have gone through five years in state secondary schools without ever having received a single full set of text books for any class.
Over time, the book distribution regime has been cumbersome and controversial. Sometimes, it seems to stretch both the ministry’s book distribution unit and the schools’ to their respective limits.
The Ministry of Education has sought to put in place measures designed to ensure that books loaned to students are returned so as to save itself the cost of buying new ones every year. There are instances – many, we understand – in which books are abused, destroyed or stolen. Several years ago some schools were known to ask parents to make modest returnable deposits on the books loaned to their children. This, as far as we are aware was not official policy and it is not being applied in schools these days. What is official policy, according to a Ministry of Education press release of August 13, is that “Learners must return books before Progress Reports, Examination Results, Recommenda-tions, or References are uplifted.”
The same release pronounces on students who have completed the CXC examinations, pointing out that “students who fail to return textbooks, which were loaned to them by their schools, will not be able to access their CXC results,” though some schools have been known to flip-flop on this policy in the face of parent protests.
There are other considerations too, like the additional teacher responsibilities associated with the accounting procedures and the retrieval, storage and distribution/redistribution involved in the management of the textbooks.
It is not difficult to discern that there are frequent problems, often significant ones, associated with the book distribution process from year to year. One of those problems is exactly that which faces some schools at this time, that is, a week after the start of the new academic year some children, for one reason or another, still have no state-issued textbooks and, therefore, are unable to hit the ground running as far as their studies are concerned.
The other aspect of the free textbook arrangement worthy of mention here has to do with limited access, a circumstance in which students have access to text books in a controlled environment inside the classroom or in the library, which means that there is no provision for home use, unless parents opt to buy those books.
Rising costs and the high level of non-return and /or destruction of books have, over time, combined to place a significant additional financial burden on the public treasury as far as textbooks purchases are concerned. That having being said the free text book regime still has its adherents for obvious reasons. On the other hand there exists an increasingly persuasive argument for reevaluating and modifying the system to ensure its greater efficiency.
An extension of that argument has been that the axiom of free education notwithstanding, a point has been reached where we at least need to begin to contemplate parents paying a subsidised price for textbooks. In these difficult economic times, subsidy or no subsidy parents are likely to frown on the idea of ‘facing the counter’ at the book stores. One might argue however that the savings accruing to the Ministry of Education from the setting aside of a free textbook policy that is fraught with shortcomings and inefficiencies might be constructively applied to some other worthwhile education initiative, though, for obvious reasons the politicians will probably be reluctant to abandon the present arrangement.
It is perhaps worth mentioning as well that the complete handing over of books sales to the private sector would mean an increase in the number of bookstores and perhaps, equally importantly, the removal from around the necks of the Ministry of Education, its schools and its teachers the albatross of book distribution to state schools. Surely, there are other alternative worthwhile pursuits to which the education system can direct its attention.
For as long as the extant arrangement is in place, however, it does not hurt to remind parents to have their children return outstanding textbooks.
