Contingency fees
Editorial
President Jagdeo's recent announcement that contingency fees are voluntary, was perhaps not ideally timed. Owing to the fact that we are so close to the opening of school, some parents, as reported in our Wednesday edition, had already paid the fees and were now asking for refunds. There is, however, another problem. Although contingency fees are technically voluntary, and the President was only restating what was already Ministry of Education policy, schools for a very long time had been treating the fees as though they were compulsory. Many had enforced payment by withholding report books, or even, in some cases, by illegally refusing to issue CXC timetables or results unless they had first received contingency fees. At the heart of the issue is the fact that many schools have been depending on the contingency fund to meet some everyday expenses - the kind of things for which the Ministry of Education would normally be responsible in a truly free education system. This has been disputed by Permanent Secretary Hydar Ally, who said in a release recently that, "all schools receive grants to cover security, sanitary, stationery and other incidental needs." He went on to state that as part of the HIPC conditionalities, "the allocation of resources for school supplies has increased substantially over the past years." The fact that there has been a substantial increase in the allocations does not necessarily mean, of course, that these are now sufficient for the purpose. Unnamed officials in the Ministry told this newspaper that nursery schools depended on contingency fees to pay cleaners, as Government did not meet that expense, while in the larger primary and secondary schools where Government does supply cleaners, additional ones were often required whose pay was also met from the fees. The report in our Wednesday issue also made reference to an official who said that for the last academic year Grade A primary and secondary schools in the city got six of the smallest sized bottles of Smell o' Pine disinfectant from the Ministry, and since this was quite inadequate for their needs, the supply was supplemented from the contingency fund. The fund also covered the purchase of such other items as brooms and toilet paper. In the nursery schools, it was reported, parents were asked to bring toilet paper and bath soap for their children, but many parents did not do so, and recourse was once again had to the contingency fees. Many schools depend on the contingency fund for underwriting the cost of report books and badges, and some use the money to pay telephone bills - which one head told this newspaper the Ministry does not cater for - and even electricity bills, to prevent the school from being disconnected when Government cannot pay on time. In these difficult economic times parents have been understandably hostile to meeting the burden of the fees, especially since they are not unaware of the fact that these are technically voluntary. They are doubly hostile in a context where they also know that education is supposed to be free. The question is, if a substantial number of parents decides not to pay as a consequence of President Jagdeo's announcement, will the Ministry of Education make up the deficit in funding for report books, cleaners, materials, etc? If they will, there is no problem. If they won't, where is the money to come from? In circumstances where qualified teachers are already in desperately short supply, the authorities can hardly expect that they will be prepared to take on duties outside the ambit of their job descriptions, like sweeping the classrooms. Ideally, of course, it would be nice if those parents who could afford the fees, paid them, and those who couldn't were subsidised by the Ministry. However, the bureaucracy and expense involved in applying a means test would probably not be worth it for the modest sums that contingency fees generate, and although it might be possible for the schools to make the decision about who was in really desperate straits, that too might conceivably not be workable in practice. The heads would find themselves bogged down in sorting out applications for a waiver, and there would be the inevitable allegations of favouritism, etc. The schools need to be kept clean, and children need report cards, etc. The Ministry will require a back-up plan if the current subventions do not cover basic supplies, and if the contingency fees fall short of normal expectations.
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