Nine Months After Melissa, Western Jamaica’s Students Are Back to School in Plyboard Rooms

• 688 schools were damaged by Hurricane Melissa
• 311 suffered severe damage
• Tents proved unreliable, some destroyed by later storms
• Timber and plyboard classrooms built as a stopgap

Nine months after Hurricane Melissa, several schools in western Jamaica remain in a state of disrepair, forcing the Ministry of Education’s Region Four to set up temporary timber and plyboard classrooms ahead of the new school year. Across the island, 688 schools sustained damage from the storm, 311 of them categorised as severely damaged.

Dr Michelle Pinnock, regional director for Region Four, told the Gleaner that tents, the original stopgap, proved unreliable over time. Some schools got tents, but we were not able to secure as many tents as possible, and we have had issues with some of the tents after a while, including with the wind and other matters, she said. A subsequent storm destroyed tents that were still in use at some schools, and rising heat made canvas structures increasingly impractical as a longer-term classroom solution.

The replacement structures now going up are more durable, but still explicitly temporary: timber-framed rooms with plyboard cladding and attention to ventilation, paired with class rotation schedules where repairs remain incomplete, so parents know which grade is using which space on a given day. Where internet access is unreliable at repair-affected schools, the region has shifted to photocopied worksheets rather than digital materials, a workaround Pinnock framed as a lesson learned from the previous year’s recovery rather than a first response.

The pattern is not confined to the west. In St Ann, a June fire, unrelated to Melissa, gutted a classroom block, library, physical education room and four grade-two classrooms at Ocho Rios Primary School, prompting a similar temporary-classroom response as a contractor is lined up. Parliamentary Secretary Marlon Morgan, touring six St Ann institutions including Ocho Rios Primary, said the damage reinforced the need for more resilient, climate-smart construction in the education sector generally, a lesson that applies as directly to fire risk as to hurricane risk. Nine months on, resilient construction remains an aspiration for a school system still running class rotations out of plyboard rooms rather than the standard it has already achieved.

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