The Editor,Sir:

I notice with much satisfaction, the comments of your guests on your editors' educational forum on the matter of zoning of schools.

As a long-standing advocate of the zoning of schools, I have beseeched, begged and cajoled successive governments to adopt this position. Indeed, I have raised it at forums, officially written to successive ministers and in the face of continued negative responses, offered the constituency I represent as a pilot area, and this as recently as this year. And only last week in Parliament, when the minister answered questions on the order paper, I again raised the matter.

Indeed, I have never failed to also raise the position at any and all graduation exercises to which I am invited to speak, and must congratulate the positive responses of those who participate in your forum, for I had become battle-weary while awaiting the voice of support from both practising educators and the voices of influence.

Certainly, the course of action has its challenges, but these can be easily overcome, and would well bring with it better and equal funding for many schools, and will once again rally to its cause the community and family support which will once again be rooted in pride and belief in self.

Socially re-engineer our society

I know of no developed country which has not, nor does not practise zoning of schools, and here in Jamaica, where our system is based on questionable demographics and an imbalance in funding, expanded by the high cost of travel and short daylight hours for studying after school, and where there is a breakdown in social order, it is incumbent on us to look deeply into our systems so as to socially re-engineer our society. and one such beginning could be the zoning of all schools, with a developed curriculum that speaks to building linkages from the basic school (already community based) to primary to secondary to tertiary.

I have offered, and am still ready, to participate as of today in this exercise and to work tirelessly to see it implemented.

Indeed, I have often said that the area of Denbigh in May Pen offers to the citizens I represent, the opportunity to choose to walk their children to basic school, then to a primary school, and on to a choice of two high schools, both of which are equipped with distance teaching for tertiary subjects, and all within walking distance of a large population of children who now have to travel to the hills of Clarendon and the Vere Plains, not to mention the parishes of St. Catherine, Kingston and Manchester, while being exposed to the vagaries of today's social problems.

I sincerely hoped that in all this time that I have made proposals to government that someone would have at least advanced the matter to have a test zone plan for May Pen which we could use as a model for this vitally needed decision.

I am, etc.,

Mike Henry, C.D., M.P.

Central Clarendon