The Tribune

By PACO NUNEZ

Tribune News Editor

THE clock is ticking and the 2014 opening date for the 2.5 billion dollar Baha Mar project is fast approaching.

Don Robinson, Baha Mar’s president, has said the biggest fear for the mega resort is that they will require about 6,000 line staff in a very short period of time, and they want to ensure the Bahamian workforce is prepared and ready for those positions.

The question is: Will they be?

The accepted figure is that about 50 per cent of our students leave school with literacy and numeracy skills below their grade level.

For decades there has been a desperate need to improve the state of education in the country. Successive governments either haven’t done enough

or have outright failed in providing the type of education which imbues graduates with the skills needed to participate in this economy.

Well, that at least is the perennial outcry from the community at large.

The truth is that government cannot do it alone, nor should it be expected to. The private sector must become the change it wishes to see.

It must invest in the country’s education system and commit to training those already in the workforce to produce the kind of people it wants to employ.

To its credit, Baha Mar is doing just that. It has appointed a training programme liaison officer to its management team, and implemented a training

initiative in conjunction with the Bahamian Contractors Association, the Bahamas Technical Vocational Institute (BTVI) and the Department of Labour.

Baha Mar has been on an aggressive social media campaign to widen the pool of potential hirees for the 7,000 posts, including 1,000 supervisors and

managers, the resort will need to fill when it opens in December 2014.

The resort will also spend about $8 million on its Service and Training Academy to help prepare Bahamians for the jobs projected to be created by

the project, and for the ongoing training of staff across all the skill sets that the resort will require.

Another resort chain committing itself to training and education in the Bahamas is Sandals Resorts International.

The remarkable thing about Sandals, the only major brand to have a presence on more than one island, is that the resort chain punches well above its

weight when it comes to improving the Bahamian workforce.

Sandals Royal Bahamian in Nassau, through the Sandals Foundation, has sponsored a series of mathematics workshops and seminars for more than 140 Bahamian teachers in the second largest school system in the country.

This partnership with the Catholic Board of Education (CBOE) began in the 2011-2012 academic year and continues now in the 2012-2013 school year.

This partnership facilitated the hosting of three mathematics workshops, which were held in New Providence, Grand Bahama and Abaco and were all

conducted under the expert tutelage of Dr Marcella Elliot, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education at the College of The Bahamas.

These initial workshops were followed by smaller sessions throughout the academic year for all teachers responsible for the teaching of mathematics

in Bahamian Catholic Primary Schools.

These series of workshops and seminars yielded some impressive results during the 2011 -2012 academic year. In the Archdiocesan Mathematics

Examinations, improvements were observed in all primary schools within the system.

Officials observed an increase of 11.4 per cent amongst the scores of students between grades K-3 and an increase of 5.7 per cent amongst students in grades 4-6.

The training affects more than 100 teaches in New Providence, 50 in Grand Bahama and 25 in Abaco. These teachers affect more than 2,000 students

which is a little more than 5 per cent of the school-going population of the entire country.

In Exuma at Sandals Emerald Bay, the resort began what they described as their “Masterclass Programme” in early 2011 with general manager Jeremy Mutton.

The programme is intended to be a self development programme for emerging Bahamian leaders – supervisors and junior managers – and also a

pre-requisite for promotions.

Participants undergo training in leadership, communication, customer service, finance, human resources, people management and IT.

The resort has even flown in eminent presenters like Gregory Bethel, president of Fidelity Bank; Leon Williams, former chairman of BTC; and Mike

Tesnyk, managing director of Scotiabank.

Other initiatives include: launching a culinary programme at LN Coakley High in Moss Town, Exuma, where a chef from Sandals Emerald Bay hosts a workshop for the students in the Home Economics Department every Tuesday

and Friday.

The resort also provides an apprenticeship programme for recent graduates of LN Coakley for six months in key areas of the resort including:

Housekeeping, Butler, Watersports, Mechanics, Kitchen and Public Relations.

These two institutions are putting skin in the game. For Sandals and Baha Mar, it is evident that an investment in the education of the country's population makes sound business sense.

Particularly interesting is Sandals’ effort on Exuma because it means young family islanders will not have to leave to find jobs. It also means Sandals Emerald Bay will not have to look beyond Great Exuma for the skilled workers it needs.

So, what of the government's role?

The current administration has come in with the promise of ensuring that the Bahamas remains for Bahamians. Fine. Good.

It is a perpetual promise, however, made in the heat of election campaigns, filling frustrated workers with visions of overnight mass revocations of work permits.

It is a convenient and even cathartic dream for many and successive governments have rode in on the back of this fantasy for decades.

However, neither the previous administration nor this one has addressed the reason why businesses are driven to look for workers overseas: Quite simply, because they can’t find any with the right skills here at home.

No one addresses the crumbling classrooms, crowded schools, bad teachers, uninspiring administrators and the parents who have failed to instil a love of learning in their children.

Evoking Bahamians' strong sense of nationalism, our political class has been able to massage us into a false reality where our mediocrity is good enough and citizenship is the only qualification we need to survive and thrive in the dog-eat-dog world of a capitalist economy.

Nationalism, at least the way we've practised it since 1973, has done us no favours. What it has done is created a culture of self-pity, greed, lack of perspective, materialism and entitlement.

After sowing the wind by encouraging Bahamians to cease being “hewers of wood and drawers of water” without providing the education needed to take advantage of new opportunities, our political, economic and civic leaders are reaping a whirlwind of unrealistic expectations from a population that wishes the expulsion of every foreigner on a work permit.

Nationalism has not protected us from the harsh realities that must be endured by a population unable to substantially benefit from the opportunities present in its own country.

The fact that we are living in an age of great technological and economic progress without any marked improvement in the quality of student we are graduating is sufficient evidence of this.

And this has very little to do with benefiting from the jobs provided by foreign investors.

It manifests itself in a shocking – I’ll even dare say a soul crushingly depressing – lack of creativity and initiative when it comes to launching our own businesses which either benefit from mega-ventures like Baha Mar, or the only game in town in the case of Sandals Emerald Bay, or creating and expanding current industries.

With that said, those who benefit from our economy, who have become wealthy from our economy, must care enough to assist us in changing this situation. This is why I used Baha Mar and Sandals as an example earlier. 

They are aggressively investing in the human capital they need on the islands on which they operate.

Other institutions which, like these resorts, are investing in the education and training of our people must continue and those who are not must stop whining and follow suit.

We don’t need another lecture from the business community on the state of our educational system – we know how bad it is. In fact, we've known for at least two generations. What are you doing to help fix it?

The poor quality of our graduates is a threat to the stability of our Commonwealth. The strength of our economy and our democracy will depend on our educators’ success in engendering a respect for freedom, diversity and equality and equipping students with the tools they need to participate and succeed in the marketplace.

President John F Kennedy said that “liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.” 

Education will be the only thing that defines for us whether this will be an age of profit and plunder or one of diversity and enlightenment.

What do you think?

Email questions or comments to pnunez@tribunemedia.net, or join the conversation at www.tribune242.com/opinion/insight