They told us, do well in school and you will get into a good college: do well in college and you will have a better life; but what if the school you are attending is not helping you to learn? What then?
Excelling in school is ordinarily considered a strong indicator of what our future holds for us. Yes, there are exceptions, but consistent school achievement and success in life usually go hand in hand.
As we continue to read in the press, or hear on the radio, our public schools are in trouble, and have outdated or little supplies, nonfunctional bathrooms, dilapidated buildings, teachers on sickouts or stressed, coupled with our students consistently scoring at the bottom of the range on standardized tests, we need to react. We collectively need to take action, offer answers or support or demand real long-term solutions. We cannot sit back and let this continue. I find it painful to sit by and watch our children die a slow intellectual death with their chances for a bright future diminished.
My daughter attends private school, and has since the day she started school. It would be so easy to say, yeah the public schools have problems, thank God mine is in a private school. However, I am not comfortable with this thought, because I believe that as the public schools go so goes the future of the Virgin Islands. A future, I might add, that includes all of us.
In large part, public school graduates and dropouts will control the quality of life in years to come in the Virgin Islands. Why do I say this? Just look at the sheer numbers from the 98-99 school year, which according to the Department of Education there were about 6,300 students in non-public schools and close to 21,000 in public schools. A ratio greater than three to one. Given these figures it would only seem natural to assume that most of our present and future workforce and leaders come, or will come, from the ranks of public school students. Deficient students will make deficient leaders, entrepreneurs and employees.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Our little children are some of the brightest found anywhere. Visit an early childhood program and you will clearly see this. Their faces are bright, animated and shine with their desire to learn. However, something negative happens to some of them as they move into the higher grades, and it doesn’t seem in their or our best interest.
Analytical thinking, high-tech equipment, and probably an electronic age that we can’t even imagine, will heavily drive the work force of our combined future. Who will be in this highly complex workforce? Will we have to recruit off-island workers? Isn’t this a big problem already? Isn’t this something people talk about all the time in every conceivable forum? Quality public education could and would address this, but when will it start?
Many parents send their children to private schools because they are concerned about the vagaries and issues surrounding public education. Who would not prefer to stop paying private school tuition and instead use the public schools for which we already pay our taxes? Who could not find another use for the $3,000 to $8,000 we pay in annual private school fees?
I wonder, if there were no private schools would we have a better public school system? Would the many middle class families who would then be required to send their children into the public education system be tolerant or accept what we hear is happening in our public schools?
Using this thought process, I then wonder if the parents of private school students feel a false sense of security that whatever is happening in the public schools does not affect us? Do we also pride ourselves, falsely, that we are OK because we choose or can afford a better route? I wonder about this. I also wonder if we understand, as I said earlier, that how our public schools go so goes our future in the Virgin Islands. The sheer numbers tell the story.
Perhaps we need to explore new ways, such as:
● create smaller schools
● privatize a school or two
● give one or two to the University to run
● get the Junior ROTC to run a year round public military school
● create magnet schools
● establish special alternative schools for at risk primary students (prevent failure, rather than wait until they fail to help them)
● give a small school to teachers and parents to control and run
● specialize schools to meet the different ways that students learn
I am sure that many people in and outside the public school system have ideas of ways we can do things different and better, much more so than I. By the way, whatever happened to the report compiled by the Blue Ribbon Committee on Education during the Schneider Administration? Were there recommendations in it that could help us? If there were, and I suspect there were, we should implement them. We must act before it is absolutely too late.
Editor’s note: Catherine Lockhart Mills of St. Thomas, a former Human Services commissioner, holds a master’s degree in social work. She is a regular columnist at The Source. You can send comments to her on the articles she writes or topics you would like her to address at [email protected]">.