As Jamaica’s legislative committee weighs proposed changes to expand the national Child Diversion Programme into school disciplinary spaces, Education Minister Dr. Dana Morris Dixon has drawn a critical line, urging policymakers to preserve the separation between criminal offenses and school-based behavioral misconduct. She warned that ill-considered expansion of the diversion program could erode the foundational function of the country’s existing child protection infrastructure.
Speaking during Thursday’s sitting of the Joint Select Committee tasked with reviewing the Child Diversion Act, Morris Dixon acknowledged that persistent disruptive behavior in Jamaican schools demands more robust, targeted intervention. However, she pushed back against framing every campus incident through the lens of the criminal justice system.
Her comments were delivered in direct response to proposals put forward by University of the Commonwealth Caribbean student Daniel Barnes, who had called on the committee to incorporate common school disciplinary issues—including physical fights, persistent bullying, and petty theft—into the Child Diversion Programme. The push for reform stems from growing public anxiety over rising rates of youth violence across Jamaican educational institutions.
Barnes, who serves on a school disciplinary committee, told the panel that current pathways for addressing escalating misconduct are fragmented and ineffective. He noted that even when schools refer students with persistent behavioral issues to existing agencies such as the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA) and restorative justice practitioners, interventions often fail to drive meaningful long-term behavior change. To address this gap, he put forward a three-tiered framework designed to intervene early, before minor misconduct escalates into criminal activity or severe violent harm.
Morris Dixon countered that welfare-focused interventions for at-risk students are already well-established under Jamaica’s Child Care and Protection Act (CCPA), delivered primarily through the CPFSA, which maintains direct ongoing partnerships with schools and families across the island. “In the situations that have come up in recent times, the CPFSA has been involved with the schools. They have taken the children, they have visited the families, visited the homes, done the psychological support, given that kind of support, and given lots of other support to the children, very similar to what happens in the Child Diversion Programme,” the minister explained. “There’s just a difference between children who come into conflict with the law and those who are seen to be somewhat uncontrollable or having issues.”
While the two systems use similar supportive approaches, Morris Dixon stressed that the distinction between them is fundamental and must not be eliminated. She urged committee members to conduct a full mapping of all existing youth support frameworks operating in Jamaican schools before moving forward with any legislative amendments.
“It’s important that we understand the whole lay of the land, which is something I have been saying, so that we understand where child diversion starts and ends, where CCPA starts and ends, and where there are any gaps, in terms of some of the approaches and techniques, and then when we find the gaps, we figure out which legislation is appropriate to do it under,” she added.
The minister also suggested that many of the perceived gaps in addressing school misconduct stem from administrative shortcomings rather than gaps in legislation, warning against creating duplicative systems that waste resources and confuse institutional roles. Her intervention has reframed the committee’s debate, shifting focus from sweeping expansion to targeted gap-fixing that preserves the core purposes of both the child protection and criminal diversion frameworks.