The unfinished Steer Town High School in St Ann slated to accept 115 students based on the Grade Nine Achievement Test. - Norman Grindley/Chief Photographer

The Ministry of Education has placed more than 100 students who sat the Grade Nine Achievement Test (GNAT) in grade 10 at a school which, up to the start of this school year, did not have any such grade.

Administrators at the Steer Town Primary and Junior High School in St Ann on Monday confirmed that 115 students have been placed there based on performances in this year's GNAT.

That was a surprise for principal Erona Brown-Dean.

"We were unable to register those students (during the summer) as we did not have adequate space to accommodate them. It is not normal for us to have a grade 10 group," Brown-Dean told The Gleaner.

But after discussions with officials of the Ministry of Education, it was decided that the school would be expanded and a grade 10 introduced to accommodate the students who were initially slated to attend the still-under-construction Steer Town High School.

"After communication with the regional director, plans were made for us to put up a board structure for three classes which will accommodate the grade 10 students," explained Brown-Dean.

Work on the board structure started last Friday, with the contractor promising that the building would be ready in time for the students to begin classes next Monday.

But when the Gleaner team visited the area, it was clear that it would be difficult for the construction work to be done in time.

Even if the building is finished, that will not solve the many new problems facing the administrators, who will see the population moving up by more than 10 per cent to almost 12,000.

More teachers a problem

That will put a burden on the infrastructure of the school, including bathrooms, canteen and play area.

Even more problematic is the search for teachers for the grade 10 students.

"What we plan to do is that we are not going to have the teachers now on staff working with the grade 10 students. We have been given permission by the Ministry of Education to employ the additional teachers that we require. We are also making plans to employ additional janitors," said Brown-Dean.

The school will also need to add to the two reading specialists it now employs.

On Monday, the school started tointerview potential teachers and found three persons to fill the new positions but no teacher was found for mathematics or music.

Brown-Dean and her team are now registering the grade 10 students but they will face another challenge to determine the reading levels of these children.

That is a problem the school faced with its intake of new students placed there based on this year's Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT).

Of the 104 students placed at the school after GSAT, only seven achieved full mastery of the basic subjects.

That has forced the school to be doing remedial work in grade seven and the same could happen for the grade 10 cohort.

In the meantime, if the Steer Town High School is not ready to begin operation next September, Brown-Dean and her team could find themselves having to introduce a grade 11.

Efforts to get a comment from the education ministry were unsuccessful yesterday but the minister responsible for the portfolio Andrew Holness had already announced that there was a struggle to place the GNAT students.

In fact, the announcement of the results was delayed by almost two weeks while the ministry tried to place the students.

"Many of these students did so poorly that they cannot be placed in a second-cycle high school, so we had to ask them to stay back in the junior high or all-age schools where we had them in special programmes called the special empowerment programme," Holness told journalists during a press conference.

"This year, the difficulty exists because for the previous three years, the students who did not perform to the point where we could place them in high school, we asked them to repeat," Holness said.

arthur.hall@gleanerjm.com