Senator Morgan Presses Principals to Reclaim Out-of-School Students

Senator Marlon Morgan, Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, has pressed school administrators to take the lead in finding learners who have drifted away from formal schooling and bringing them back into the classroom.

Speaking on Tuesday (July 21) at the Ministry’s Region One Back-to-School Conference at the Grand Palladium Resort in Hanover, he said principals, teachers and other education partners must join forces with parents, churches, community figures and school boards so that young people return and finish their studies.

Schools, he argued, are among the safest environments available to children and ought to function as a shelter from many of the difficulties they encounter where they live.

“We know that the school is a safe space for our children…; it is important for us as school leaders to not just sit on our laurels but be as active as we can be in reaching out to our students and getting them back into the teaching and learning environment, because there are so many undesirables lurking in their communities,” Senator Morgan said.

He pointed out that after the COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricane Melissa, a number of students never resumed classes and took up work instead. While a wage at that age can look appealing, he warned, quitting school early may sharply narrow their options later on.

“There are some persons who didn’t show up back at school after COVID…; they got a job and say, ‘Boy, this is good. I’m not going to need school again’. You need to go to great lengths, work with all the stakeholders, meaning community leaders, churches, the pastors, you name it… seek out these parents, seek out these households, seek out these students and impress upon them the very critical importance of coming back to school,” he urged.

Adults across the sector, he stressed, share a duty to steer young people toward choices that strengthen their prospects over time.

“We cannot, as a sector, afford for our young people to be making less than prudent, less than sensible decisions in the here and now… . We as the adults in the room… have to go to great lengths to actively seek them out,” he said.

He also called on school heads to push advocacy as a shared effort, saying that bringing key partners into the work yields deeper, more durable gains.

“If you go alone, you may go faster, but if you go together, meaning if you have your key stakeholders on board and you all go together, you are likely to go farther,” he said.

The Region One Back-to-School Conference ran for three days from July 20 to 22 under the theme ‘Shaping the Future of Education through Resilience and Innovation’. Principals, vice-principals, education officers and other partners gathered to ready the system for the opening of the 2026/27 school year.