Minister cites importance of review process in school repairs

FERRIS, Westmoreland — The importance of speed and having a review process are among the lessons education minister Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon is taking from the less-than-smooth process of repairing more than 300 schools damaged by last year’s Hurricane Melissa. “With our contractors, you have to have multiple entities that are reviewing. There are multiple stages of review.

I think we’ve also learned how to do it quicker. Because, remember, it’s 300 contracts with 300 different scopes of work. And you’re going to need to have the quantity surveyors doing their work for 300 different contracts.

It’s a lot, but I do think that going through this, it will make it much easier as we’re doing projects going forward because we’re not going to be in a position to do this many [schools] again. And so we’ve really built that muscle memory to be able to do this better going forward,” stated Morris Dixon, who also spoke about steps taken to ensure buildings can cope better with future storms. The minister was responding to queries from the Jamaica Observer while fielding questions from the media at Ferris Primary School in Westmoreland following a tour of schools in the parish on Wednesday.

The other institutions visited were Maud McLeod High and Beaufort Primary schools, both located in Darliston. Describing the undertaking as unprecedented, Morris Dixon again conceded that fixing the damage left by last October’s Hurricane Melissa had been a challenge. That is a big task, a very difficult task, under very difficult conditions.

There were areas that didn’t work as well as we wanted, and then some things went really smoothly,” she said. “It was a mixed bag but the team at NET (National Education Trust) has been very focused on reviewing what’s out there, the contracts, and making sure things are happening. The regions have also been very much a part of it.

With all of us working together, I think we’ve been able to iron out a lot of kinks. There were a lot of kinks in the beginning, as you would have in any kind of emergency situation like this, but I think we’ve been able to iron them out,” the minister added. Meanwhile, as the nation anticipates the reopening of schools for the new term, Mo…