By LETRE SWEETING

Tribune Staff Reporter

lsweeting@tribunemedia.net

THE public school attendance rate is at 91 percent this year, according to Acting Education Director Dominique Russell.

As most public schools opened as scheduled on August 23, Mrs Russell told reporters on the sidelines of an event on Friday afternoon that attendance rates have decreased slightly from 95 percent in December 2022 to 91 percent.

Mrs Russell noted the importance of attendance officers, individuals tasked by the ministry to follow up and provide support for parents and students to ensure the students attend school regularly.

She said through targeted walkabouts, the ministry has been able to determine those students who have been absent and assist them with getting back to school consistently.

She said though certain areas of New Providence had attendance rates as low as 54 percent, programmes and initiatives are being implemented to address these issues.

“In some districts, it was down to 54 percent, our attendance,” Mrs Russell said.

“So, we would have done the walkabouts, we would have done some really targeted supports, so that children who needed uniforms, who may need breakfast and lunch, etc, that they were given those so that they could remove those barriers from education.

“We also sought to ensure that those who were chronically absent, that our attendance officers, they went door-to-door and searched to make sure we could find those children.

“At one point we were really at 94 percent in terms of attendance. But when you consider consistency, we’re at 91 percent.

“When we say chronic absence, we mean a child who may come to school for four days, but they don’t come on a Friday. So we go and we look for those children, and we use moral suasion to ensure that parents get their children in school,” she said.

Mrs Russell highlighted some of the issues that chronically absent students may be experiencing, which the ministry is working to address, including provisions for a feeding programme, which was launched this year.

“Some of the issues that some of our children are experiencing, you have children who don’t have lunch, children who don’t have breakfast, children who do not have uniforms,” she said.

“So, we have programmes and in fact, we are putting on now a pilot programme that will allow us to provide breakfast for those children who are chronically absent in some of our schools.

“The idea is that their parents won’t have to search or look for lunch or breakfast, so they can come to school. We meet that need, feed that brain, feed the body and then, of course, we want to feed them with the educational opportunities.”

The Ministry of Education supports more than 40,000 students throughout The Bahamas. Mrs Russell said the ministry’s main focus this year is literacy and numeracy, with a Back to Basics theme for students from primary school, straight up to Grade 12.