With the number of homicides this year already nearing double digits, SERVOL’s Junior Life Programme (JLP) could not have come at a more opportune time. The Department of Education last September sent teachers to Trinidad and Tobago for JLP training to ensure that public sector schools are equipped to perform the necessary interventions that marginalized primary school students need in order to thrive and flourish.
SERVOL (Service Volunteered For All) describes itself as an organisation of “weak, frail, ordinary, imperfect yet hope-filled and committed people seeking to help weak, frail, ordinary, hope-drained people become agents of attitudinal and social change in a journey which leads to total human development”.
According to its website, the organisation has several programmes, notably Early Childhood Care and Education, Adolescent Development, and Parent Outreach. The JLP was established in April 1994 to “fill an educational gap between the primary and secondary school system for students who scored below 30% in the Common Entrance Examination”. There are ten such centres in Trinidad and Tobago.
On Monday, in the conference room at the Office of the Prime Minister, Saint Lucia’s ten teacher graduates were present to discuss and share what they had learned during the four-month JLP and the wider impact it can have on Saint Lucia’s education sector. As a government official stated: “The training provided to the ten selected teachers at the JLP is consistent with the key aspects of the Education Quality Improvement Programme, which places emphasis on implementing policies and strategies geared towards the provision of the requisite psycho-social, emotional and academic support services for at-risk students within Saint Lucia’s primary level of education.”
“At-risk students” was a recurring theme throughout Monday’s discussions, and that the more traditional means of interacting with and punishing these students are ineffective. It was also pointed out that many of our at-risk students grow up to commit crimes and are already contributing to our high crime rate.
One graduate spoke about alternative means of dealing with a child. “There’s this debate here about corporal punishment,” she declared. “When you go to SERVOL, you understand how to go through behaviour modifications and to deal with the students, without touching them. All we have to do is listen to them. There is hope for every single child if we can just listen to and understand them.”
She said the purpose of JLP is to make those students self-aware; to understand that the area you come from does not have to define who you are.
“If we take a look at the areas at-risk students come from,” she noted, “you’ll quickly realize most come from what we term ‘the ghetto’. What the JLP aims to do is to take them out of that mindset. We cannot remove them from their situation but we can change their way of thinking. Once we’ve done this, we have developed the whole child. The ghetto is only a state of mind. So, if they understand this, they will get out of the ghetto and I think we can then start to see a reduction in crime.”
Marie-Grace Auguste, Project Coordinator of EQuIP, described an at-risk student as: “Any child that isn’t able to access the education and information they need to survive this modern, dynamic, competitive world. Once they fall through the cracks and they can’t hit that percentage that we set them up for at the Common Entrance or any other level; once they cannot make it and have fallen through the cracks, they become at-risk.”
They’re not only at-risk to themselves, she pointed out. “They’re a risk to the society on a whole, because they cannot function. They don’t have the means to function as normal people, and that necessary self-development and self-awareness just isn’t there. And because it isn’t, they cannot acquire the skills they need to be employable and self-employed and to make a difference in the society. So teachers can actually observe who the at-risk students are if they take the time.”
Auguste stated that the interventions planned by EQuIP will target various age groups, and it will continue to partner with SERVOL where programmes are already in place for each of these respective age-groups; from Early Childhood, all the way up to adolescents and young adults.
“Someone mentioned that these problems start from the womb,” Auguste recalled. “It is a serious point, because the child gets its nutrition from the womb, its wherewithal, comfort and nurturing; and if these aren’t provided, those children will grow up to become a problem. So, we are hoping that from the early childhood coming up, we can add something to the JLP in the future. If we can get these programmes throughout the entire school system, it should help to keep our people on the straight and narrow.”
She added: “Young people are resorting to crime as the first option; it shouldn’t be an option at all.”
