Ruthlyn James | Storms will come, learning must continue

When nature tests a country, its schools reveal the depth of its social fabric. Jamaica’s classrooms, time and again, have proven to be more than spaces for lessons; they are sanctuaries of hope, safety and continuity. Yet, as we move from response to reform, our task is no longer to rebuild what has fallen but to re-engineer education for endurance, ensuring that learning and emotional safety continue even when survival itself is under siege.

From Hurricane Gilbert (1988) to Ivan (2004) and Beryl (2024), our teachers, parents, and ministries have shown courage under pressure. The Ministry’s mobilisation after Beryl when 364 schools were assessed as impacted and major repair funding was deployed across 266 institutions, reflected teamwork and faith in public service. But Hurricane Melissa has upended every prior definition of readiness. Its Category 5 winds tore through Jamaica’s western and southern parishes, levelling homes, submerging roads, and crippling power grids. The devastation has been described as the most severe disruption to schooling since Gilbert.

Hurricane Melissa has redefined readiness. Reopening alone can no longer be the benchmark of success. Resilience must now mean sustained learning amid catastrophe, the capacity to hold instruction and belonging when every structure around the child has failed.

In these parishes, the hurricane did not merely interrupt schooling; it dismantled the ecosystem that allows it to exist. Classrooms are now shelters or rubble. Teachers have become first responders and survivors. Many are parents who have lost their own roofs yet rise each morning to educate our nation’s children. They carry grief in one hand and lesson plans in the other. The question no one dares to ask aloud is whether they are mentally whole enough to bear the weight of a nation’s healing while their own homes remain broken.

INVISIBLE TOLL

Disaster response policies often count damaged classrooms and fallen trees but rarely count the invisible toll on educators’ minds. After Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, a study of 8,167 teachers found likely clinically significant symptoms in 13.1 per cent for anxiety, 8.7 per cent for depression, and 5.4 per cent for PTSD, underscoring the mental-health load borne by the profession. Similar post-storm accounts from the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Bahamas describe sustained stress, burnout, and trauma among teachers, even as schools reopen. Jamaica is no different: our teachers are the emotional infrastructure of the system and that infrastructure is under strain.

Rebuilding must therefore include a Teacher Wellness Protocol: access to counselling, trauma-informed peer groups, stipends for displaced staff, and mental-health days embedded into recovery schedules. To ask teachers to restore normalcy without restoring them is to build resilience on exhaustion.

In this post-Melissa landscape, the traditional notion of continuity must give way to relief-linked education a model that integrates survival and learning. Human readiness is now the priority above all else. Curriculum for the affected must bend to context: trimmed, prioritised, and humane.

The urgency is not rhetorical; it is mathematical. UNICEF estimates that Jamaica’s children lost 1.3 billion in-class hours during COVID-19 closures. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, schools were fully closed for an average of 225 days, among the longest in the world and regional learning poverty rose by nearly 25 percentage points, from about half of 10-year-olds before the pandemic to almost eight in ten afterwards. In Jamaica, poorer and rural households were least able to sustain remote learning: official briefs note that only about one in five poor households with school-aged children had a working computer, and internet access lagged far behind urban areas, deepening inequality. In 2024, at least 242 million students worldwide experienced climate-related schooling disruptions, a stark reminder that such shocks are no longer rare. Without decisive intervention, Hurricane Melissa risks adding months of learning regression in Jamaica’s western parishes; for roughly 10 000 PEP and CSEC students, that could mean hundreds more falling below proficiency, a setback with lasting educational, social, and economic costs.

HOW WILL LEARNING CONTINUE

The question, then, is not “When will schools reopen?” but “How will learning continue while we recover?” A single, centralised policy cannot address two different Jamaica; one where students have already returned to face-to-face classrooms, and another where schools still double as shelters or remain damaged. Policymakers must embrace asymmetrical equity, providing different levels of support to achieve the same right to learn.

Relief-linked schooling in recovery zones should include school-shelter partnerships where students receive meals and printed materials simultaneously; mobile learning and therapy hubs powered by generators; and the activation of radio, parish loudspeakers and WhatsApp micro-lessons. Meanwhile, in stable zones, face-to-face instruction can continue safely, supported by blended lesson planning, data stipends for teachers and continuity drills to maintain readiness.

Among the most fragile groups are exam-year students; PEP and CSEC candidates whose aspirations cannot pause indefinitely. For these learners, the Ministry’s emergency education plan can evolve into a structured Relief Term focused on examinable core subjects. Grading fairness must be safeguarded through an impact index, weighting displacement, days without power and infrastructure loss to ensure that western students are judged by context, not circumstance.

Short-term compassion must be translated into long-term structure. Jamaica can lead the region by legislating a Continuity of Learning Act requiring every school to maintain a rapid-pivot plan; establishing an Education Relief Fund that releases micro-grants automatically upon disaster declaration; developing a National Learning Equity Dashboard linking education, infrastructure, and social-welfare data; and mandating teacher micro-credentials in trauma-responsive and inclusive digital instruction. These are not luxuries, they are the architecture of national resilience.

Each of these pillars represents a shift from reaction to readiness. A Continuity of Learning Act would formalise school preparedness much like fire-safety or evacuation plans, ensuring that every institution has clear procedures for instruction during disruption, backed by accountability. An Education Relief Fund would allow principals to act quickly without waiting for prolonged approvals, supporting emergency teaching supplies, food assistance, and safe learning zones. The National Learning Equity Dashboard would merge data from the Ministries of Education, Health, and Local Government, providing real-time insight into which communities are cut off, which schools are ready, and where psychosocial needs are rising. And by mandating teacher micro-credentials in trauma-informed care and hybrid instruction, Jamaica would invest in the very people who keep the system alive, equipping them to teach through crisis with competence and compassion.

Such policies would not only safeguard continuity but also symbolise a moral contract between government and citizen: that every Jamaican child, regardless of geography or circumstance, will not be left behind when disaster strikes.

As the island rebuilds, the classroom must remain our most sacred site of renewal. In shelters and community centres, teachers still gather the nation’s children, proving that our greatest resource is not infrastructure, but humanity. Professor Rex Nettleford once said, “Education is that which makes us fully human.” If that is true, then recovery must begin not only with cement and steel, but with empathy and equity.

Ruthlyn James is the founding director of Adonijah Group of Schools Therapy and Assessment Centre. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com