By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune News Editor

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

ABOUT 40 teachers resigned ahead of the new school year, a higher than usual figure according to Bahamas Union of Teachers President Belinda Wilson.

Education Director Dominique McCartney Russell confirmed the figure recently. 

Mrs Wilson said the resignations should not have caught officials off guard since teachers typically submit their letters months in advance.

“The effective date may have been August or September, but their letters would be in months ahead of time,” she said. “It was really disingenuous, actually, if the director gave the impression like, oops, we woke up this morning and these persons would have resigned, because they would have been given ample notice.”

She said the ministry’s repeated staffing shortfalls show “the lack of planning, or the dysfunction or the ineffectiveness of their recruitment and their retraining of teachers.”

Mrs Wilson said the roughly 40 resignations included teachers who had served as little as four years and others with more than 25 years of experience. Some non-Bahamian teachers left because their contracts expired, while Bahamian teachers cited low morale, frustration, and feeling disrespected. Others, she said, moved into new careers, joined family businesses, or took time off for family reasons.

She said education officials have not even asked departing teachers why they left or tried to convince them to stay. “What is also sad too, it seems as though education did not take the time to even ask these individuals, why are you leaving? What is it that we can improve upon and try to convince some of them to stay?” she said.

She said the shortage could affect hundreds of students. “If you only have eight teachers when you need ten, that means that you have two timetables,” she said. “That would be 40 teaching periods between Monday and Friday of each week, which would impact up to 500 students, because that would mean that we do not have a teacher to teach that discipline. Hence, the students are not getting the instruction that they need in that particular subject, which then again impacts BJC, BGCSE and their overall performance.”