Hampton High School, a 150-year-old institution located in Malvern, St. Elizabeth, is a boarding school for girls in St. Elizabeth. It shares some classes with Munro College, the nearby high school for boys defined as a boarding school, Hampton's 300 boarders are easily outnumbered by the day students who commute, mostly by bus, each day.

Unlike most other schools, Hampton and Munro provide their own transportation for commuting students "so buses and cars and vans don't turn up at Hampton's gate at arbitrary times. All the students come in on a bus, the bus is parked in a particular area. The impact on punctuality and discipline of that system is enormous".

It is a major challenge running Hampton, Parchment admitted, pointing to the daily task of procuring enough resources to maintain the high standards of the school.

"You are responsible for the plant, it's 24/7 - the responsibility for the young ladies of Hampton or those who are entrusted to our care during the daytime; to have an effective academic programme; and, good administration and visionary leadership at the level of the head mistress to ensure that the values and goals of Hampton become part of the normal life of the ladies who attend, as well as the young men from Munro College who are there."

Hampton and Munro are both trust schools, effectively owned by the Munro and Dickenson Trust. Both schools are jointly managed by a board of directors.

With this being the 150th anniversary of the school's establishment, the Hampton chairman is promising a special effort on behalf of students.

As for the composition of the school board, Parchment said the Hampton model was one that greatly assisted in the management of the school. "We have been fortunate at Hampton to have had medical doctor on the board, to have had business persons on the board with management competence, people who are into catering, so they have been able to assist with the nutritional issues. We have had people in the field of finance and accounting and these people have been critical to the management of the resources of the plant; people with backgrounds in the building trade; we have had lawyers on the board; and, most importantly, we have had educators on the board and very committed educators in the leadership. All of these factors have helped us to create a very responsive caring school that is able to handle issues in a reasonable way - in a timely and reasonable way.

Jamaica College (JC), like Hampton, is a trust school, and it dates back even earlier than the St. Elizabeth-based institution, being more than 200 years old. Board Chairman, R. Danny Williams, and other members of his team, are on a mission to restore some of the lustre that the traditional high school for boys has lost.

The first criterion of a good board, he posited, must be that its members are all "seriously interested in the school, not just people appointed for the sake of having their names on a directorship."

Williams, widely respected as a businessman, also wants to see significant improvements in the management capabilities of persons serving on school boards, and also for those directly running the schools.

"Unless we start having all the schools run by people who have been trained as managers, we will never overcome the problem because people will major in minors if they are not properly trained," he said.

This, he argued, should apply at all levels of the school's management.

"You can't have people come up and then become heads of departments; they are expected to do a management job or a vice-principal or a principal; all of these people have to be exposed to the basic rudiments of management and training."

A major issue for the JC chairman relates to the long distances some students have to travel to school. With 40 per cent of the students coming from outside the Corporate Area - some as far away as St. Thomas and Clarendon - he believes both the school and the students are cheated in the process.

The solution, he contends, lies in a zoning system for schools, largely confining students to schools within defined geographical areas.

Anton Thompson - chairman of the Holy Trinity High School board and vice-chairman of the Campion College board - presented a study in similarities and contrasts in the history and fortunes of the two institutions.

The main similarity is that both schools come from the Roman Catholic tradition. Holy Trinity is owned by the Archdiocese of Kingston and Campion College is owned by the Society of Jesus.

The two schools differ markedly, however, with Campion, a high-achieving institution, academically being the top choice for many students and their parents, while Holy Trinity, on the other hand, comes low down on the priority list.

That does not mean, however, that the school is short of students. On the contrary, it has to operate two shifts, with 1,750 students packed into what Thompson contends is a "relatively small campus".

Like Danny Williams, Thompson wants to see a greater emphasis on the management capabilities of those running high schools, which, according to him, "have become big businesses".

Relating to his contrasting experiences at the two institutions, Thompson believes a way must be found to bring greater equity to the management of all schools.

"In the case of Campion, there is a much more substantial support system for the school because in addition to our school board on which we have professional people sitting, we also have a very active home-school association which is very supportive and a past students' association which is fairly strong."

On the other hand, he said, the parent-teacher association at Holy Trinity is small and "not very active", while the past students' association is "practically non-existent".

Dr. Henley Morgan, the well-known management consultant, is chairman of the board of management for Trench Town Comprehensive High School. While acknowledging the financial deficit that Trench Town, like most other high schools have to contend with, he argued that an even greater deficit was that of leadership at these schools. But, according to Dr. Morgan, while the ministry of education has begun to address the leadership challenge among principals and vice-principals through seminars and other avenues, no such effort is being made in respect of school-board management. The solution, he contends, may lie in grouping schools in management districts, with a strong board managing not one, but several schools in a particular district.

"You would have a single management team for maybe three or four schools in reasonable geographical proximity and from the principal down would be reporting to the regional officers, and the schools would remain independent," he said. Borrowing from the North American model, Dr. Morgan suggested that there should be a district office with a school superintendent "to whom the principals in the district may report".

Dr. Morgan suggested that management through the districts would be a significant improvement on the regional offices of the Education Ministry.

"The district offices would be headed by someone who is called a superintendent to whom the principals would report. Also, there is deficiency in terms of some specialised areas like counselling, bursar functions and so on. So when you get down to the schools level, it's quite poor. You could centralise some of that in the district office.