Senior lecturer, researcher, and coordinator of early childhood programmes at The University of the West Indies, Mona, Dr Zoyah Kinkead Clark is expressing concern for the welfare of young children, many of whom she says might be displaced come September, given the upheaval in a number of private early childhood institutions due to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

What we don't understand is that in Jamaica, the majority of early childhood institutions are privately owned and prior to COVID-19 many of them were struggling, so you can well imagine that during COVID-19 and the transition out of COVID-19, if there is ever such time, it will be worst,” Dr Kinkead Clark told a digital forum hosted by the Caribbean Centre for Educational Planning last week.

“Early Childhood institutions do not benefit from those and so even the provision of tablets and other devices, early childhood teachers do not have access to those, many of them the salaries that they earn, they didn't have the capacity and so even now teachers are left on their own; so many young children are really sitting at home not doing much,” she noted.

In noting that young children are usually put at the end rather than the beginning in terms of any kind of support, she said persons with older children would tend to place more attention on their education at this point, as it is thought that somehow the children who are at the early childhood stage have time to catch up.

We have to look at how prepared are their parents to support them at this point of time,” Kinkead Clark appealed adding, “It really is a challenging time for young children, they learn in very unique ways and technology is not always the best means through which to facilitate the unique ways in which they learn.”