SAVANNA-LA-MAR, Westmoreland — Jamaica’s education system is facing an unprecedented crisis: a sharp, sustained surge in demand for special education services that has hit the country’s most urban regions particularly hard. Senior education officials say the spike tracks closely with major public health outbreaks over the past decade, with the sharpest rise coming among children born during the COVID-19 pandemic. To meet this growing need, the Ministry of Education has launched a targeted expansion initiative to convert underused school infrastructure into accessible special education hubs, while exploring cross-government collaboration to address gaps in long-term planning.
Dionne Gayle-Smart, Assistant Chief Education Officer in the ministry’s Special Education Unit, outlined the scope of the crisis during an exclusive interview with the Jamaica Observer, held on the sidelines of the official opening of a new primary school block at Savanna-la-Mar Inclusive Academy in Westmoreland last Thursday.
“Across the entire island, we are seeing consistent growth in the number of students requiring specialized support — from learners on the autistic spectrum to those living with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD,” Gayle-Smart explained. “Even here in Westmoreland, our unit has recorded a steady rise in placement applications for special education. Nationally, though, the situation in Kingston and St Andrew is particularly alarming.”
Drawing on years of data tracking enrollment trends, Gayle-Smart noted that demand spikes have consistently followed major epidemic and pandemic events that have impacted Jamaica over the last 10 years. The country recorded its first large-scale chikungunya outbreak in 2014, followed by a Zika epidemic in 2016, and the national COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
“I am not a public health researcher, but the timeline lines up very clearly with these three major outbreaks,” she said. “In the years following each event, we have seen a measurable increase in the number of school-aged children presenting with neurodevelopmental conditions that require special education support.”
Official unit data puts the increase in demand following the chikungunya and Zika outbreaks at roughly 25 percent, Gayle-Smart said. But the rise after COVID-19 has been far steeper, with demand jumping between 50 and 60 percent. Today, the children born at the height of the pandemic between 2020 and 2021 — who officials have dubbed “Covid babies” — are now entering primary school, bringing the crisis to a head.
“When you map the timestamps, it lines up perfectly: the children born in 2020 are now five and six years old, and they are the cohort currently seeking special education services,” she added.
To address the sudden influx of students needing support, the Ministry of Education has rolled out its flagship Inclusive Spaces Programme, an initiative that repurposes unused school infrastructure to expand specialized capacity without the cost of building entirely new facilities from the ground up. The program targets former primary and junior high schools, which have surplus space after the national phase-out of the junior high school model.
“This is one of my core projects, and we are working to roll out these new accessible spaces across every region of the country,” Gayle-Smart said. “The vacant wings left after the junior high phase-out are being fully retrofitted and refurbished to serve as modern, inclusive learning environments for students with special needs.”
The first two new inclusive hubs, located at Constant Spring Primary and John Mills Primary in the high-demand region of St Andrew, are scheduled to open to students this September. Additional hubs in St Catherine’s Region Six are set to welcome their first cohorts as early as January, reflecting the higher concentration of demand in Jamaica’s urban centers. But expanding access to rural regions like Region Four — which covers Westmoreland, Hanover, and St James — presents unique, complex challenges that officials are still working to resolve.
“Working in the rural western parishes is a little bit ticklish,” Gayle-Smart acknowledged. “Many of the available vacant spaces are located in the mountainous interior, far from population centers, which creates major transportation barriers for students and their families.”
To overcome this barrier, the ministry is currently exploring a partnership between the Inclusive Spaces Programme and the National Rural School Bus Programme to provide dedicated transportation for students accessing rural special education hubs. As of yet, however, no suitable site has been confirmed for a permanent inclusive space in Region Four. In urban centers within the region, such as Savanna-la-Mar and Montego Bay, existing school buildings are already operating at full capacity, leaving no vacant space to repurpose.
“In the urban centers of western Jamaica, all existing school space is already in use, so repurposing is not an option,” Gayle-Smart explained. “That means we have to shift toward planning for new construction, which we are actively exploring at this time.”
Beyond expanding physical infrastructure, the ministry is pushing for long-term systemic change through inter-ministerial collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Wellness, with the goal of identifying developmental delays and planning for future demand years before children reach school age. Gayle-Smart said early data sharing between health and education authorities would allow the ministry to proactively plan capacity, rather than reacting to sudden demand surges after they emerge.
“A seamless, cross-ministerial partnership would make a world of difference for our students,” she explained. “If the Ministry of Health can share early data on children who show developmental markers or early signs of special needs at birth, we can forecast demand years in advance. If we had had that data after the 2020 COVID-19 peak, we would have known how many children would need support by 2025-2026, and we could have built capacity ahead of time. That kind of inter-sectoral planning is absolutely critical for addressing this crisis moving forward.”
Jamaica’s experience is far from unique: the island’s surge in special education demand mirrors a growing global trend, with school systems across the world struggling to keep up with rising need. Recent U.S. federal data shows more than 8.2 million American students currently qualify for special education services, while a June 2025 BBC report found that one in five students in England now receives special education support — a 44 percent increase since 2016.
