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Teacher’s Plight

Jun 10, 2022 Letters

Dear Editor,

This teacher, a Headmistress, wanted desperately to talk to the President of her plight to survive on a salary that makes it difficult to pay regular monthly bills; then for food, transportation, and, most urgently, the mortgage for the home she must of course maintain for children to enjoy.
Meanwhile she has to set a standard for those she supervises, so that as a team they can all perform to the satisfaction of the constant visiting inspectorate, with records having to be kept up-to-date.
The system demands that each school achieves the optimum results, so that parents and the Ministry can be proud of the children’s achievements. Yet, despite the challenges some of which have to be addressed through self-help and, in other instances, the support of an appreciative Parent/Teachers Association, performance is not rewarded by increments as allowed in the respective salary scales, which in any case are very narrow.
No account is taken of the counselling to be done regarding the errant student, and parent who also may not realise that either or both need help, but rather can be confrontational, desperate as domestic circumstances may be.
So there is an amalgam of stressors with which each individual has to cope, even while striving to achieve targets as a team and on schedule. Their public service colleagues, on the other hand, do not appear to experience the same constraints, so few of them having to achieve specific measurable targets. Just see examples of the pay differentials shown below.
One egregious mistake in compensation management perpetrated by all administrations is, when disposed, they award salary increases to ‘Contracted Employees’ in the same manner as their pensionable counterparts. It is worth confirming whether such a generous clause is included in their respective ‘contracts’, assuming the latter actually exist.
Meanwhile, the professional objective observer would easily recognise the irrationality of the pay structure the Teachers Service Commission has inherited from pre-independence times. Surely in the current re-created Caricom partnership, the decision-makers (Ministry and Union) could glean lessons from a more enlightened Barbados arrangement at least. Neither would have anything to lose, certainly after having examined the disparities shown below.
In the process, once more, one must bring to attention, the ridiculousness of such permanent positions as:
• Temporary Unqualified Teacher
• Non-Graduate Senior Assistant Master
• Untrained Graduate Master
Of 29 scales (?) the highest is so fixed that it is called SPECIAL – at $356,140 per month for schools like Queen’s College and Bishop’s High for example, while the Permanent Secretary of any size of Ministry is at the top of a 14 grade pay structure – at $469,671 – $831,010. See how even the minimum is easily more than $100,000 than the highly acclaimed College/School Heads could ever earn.
But then just contemplate the following samples of widths of salary scales, un-utilised as they long have been.
The following are the (in)comparable top salary grade/scales:
Public Service Teaching Service
14 – $469,671 – 831,010 Special – $356,140 – 356,140
13 – $389,650 – 684,111 TS 19 – $315,557 – 338,508
12 – $315,206 – 536,991 TS 18 – $298,568 – 321,506
11 – $256,052 – 411,914 TS 17 – $280,172 – 303,128
Similar incomparabilities obtain at the following seven lowest grades:
1 – $74,900 – 81,727 TS1(A) – $79,377 – 79,377
2 – $74,900 – 84,030 TS1(B) – $79,377 – 79,377
3 – $78,391 – 88,774 TS1(C) – 83,963 – 83,963
4 – $81,968 – 93,179 TS1(D) – $90,599 – 90,599
5 – $89,791 – 113,068 TS2(A) – $84,818 – 90,599
6 – $103,359 – 129,043 TS2(B) – $90,421 – 100,954
7 – $118,484 – 164,977 TS2(C) – $100,866 – 105,551
It continues to be difficult to understand why after 56 years of Independence that those who have taught all of us have been forced to remain in a constipated colonial compensation miscontruct– for such important human developers. Surely they are deserving of the ubiquitous GRANT at least.
EB John

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