By LETRE SWEETING

Tribune Staff Reporter

lsweeting@tribunemedia.net

EDUCATION Director Dominique McCartney-Russell says the government’s new National School Breakfast Programme brings the country one step closer to eradicating poverty, which is one of the major barriers to educational opportunities for students, especially for those chronically absent.

Mrs Russell, on the sidelines of a press briefing on Thursday, gave more information on the breakfast programme announced on Wednesday in Parliament, to be funded in the upcoming fiscal year by the Davis administration.

“It is so important for our children to come to school ready to learn, so they need their brains fed, they need to be able to access educational opportunities early and sometimes they’re not able to because they’re hungry,” she said.

“For whatever reason they are not given breakfast at home, so we want to be able to provide that for those who have the need so that we take that worry off the table.

“We want to actually remove every barrier that we can to education. We have found that poverty is one of those barriers and we want to get rid of that. We want to eradicate every barrier for educational opportunities and I believe this will be so well, especially for those children that were considered chronically absent."

Mrs Russell added: “Some of the parents have indicated that they kept their children home because they didn’t have the tools to be able to function, so our schools provide uniforms for some of our children, they provide general supplies for some of our children.

“Socials Services has even provided rent for some of our homes. So this is really just another opportunity for us to ensure that children get access to educational opportunities. They don’t have to be absent, because they don’t have something in their tummy.”

Mrs Russell said that education officials have made significant headway to address learning loss overall and those students deprived of learning opportunities due to poverty.

“I think we have done a mammoth task in providing a standardised diagnostic test for all of our children in the public education system. The reason we wanted to use a standardised test is we wanted to be able to measure the successes and measure them using one test.

“It shows that at the end of the day we can say that this child is at this level and what we’re also doing is providing opportunities for remediation. Students will be able to access their remediation on their tablets.

“In the new school year, we’re also going to ensure that children have more time for remediation. We have pull-out programmes. We want to try to have a one-to-one ratio for remediation,” she said.