Shortly after the Golding administration took office, Minister of Education Andrew Holness started sounding off about building schools to replace the spaces currently occupied in the second shift of some high schools.

I wrote a letter to The Gleaner at the time asking about the logic of this move. After all, by my CXC math, it costs a lot of money to build a school which, like existing school plants, will lay largely dormant after 3 p.m.

Automatically doubling

It seemed to me at the time that employing the shift system was a method of automatically doubling the capacity of the high-school system. The problem with the second shift was that it has been treated as the ugly cousin of the first shift for second-rate students. If the Ministry of Education and principals would assign equal resources and student IQs to each shift, we could actually educate more of our children. And this without the capital outlay to build redundant plants.

By the way, how many schools have Holness been successful in building?

To this end I join in solidarity with the author of the letter 'Reintroduce shift system' in your Tuesday paper.

I am, etc.,

BRUCE W. MCKNIGHT

bruce_mcknight@hotmail.com

Brampton, Ontario