Even in rich, developed countries back-to-school, after the long summer break, comes with significant difficulties.

In Jamaica and other under-resourced countries such difficulties become many times more extreme.

Challenges such as basic repairs and maintenance, replacing broken furniture, replacing teachers who have left for whatever reason, finding additional classroom space, are ongoing issues with which the cash-strapped Jamaican State must deal.

But let’s consider for a moment the single mother on minimum wage — or, worse, unemployed — who has multiple children to send to school.

Even allowing for limited social help available through State-run initiatives such as the Programme of Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH), how does that single mother cope?

She must “suck salt thru wooden spoon” as best she can to help her children.

We suspect that single mother wasn’t far from the thoughts of our under-pressure Education Minister Mrs Fayval Williams when she urged parents last week to consider the cost of back-to-school as an investment in the future of their children.

“I know the many anxieties that exist among parents in terms of the spend that many of them would have done already and others are thinking… ‘Where am I going to get the money?’ The spend for uniform, shoes, books, knapsacks, transportation, lunch, all the other things that come with education… I want to say to our parents, it’s an investment, don’t see it as a cost,” she said.

But we all know that, with the best will in the world, you can’t get blood out of stone. Many, many parents simply will not have the money to properly equip their children for school. Worse, some children are going to end up unable to go on some days.

Hence our anger on Sunday in this space at the tardy, neglectful approach of the authorities in responding to the crisis which faced residents on the Manchester/Trelawny border when a bridge connecting them to school, work, and much else, collapsed. A year later, work to replace the bridge is only at the design stage. The brutal truth is that some children in that remote community will not be going to school at all, because finding the money for transportation on alternative routes is not possible.

We know the novel coronavirus pandemic and the resulting closure of physical school had an impact at the time. But, in any organised, well-ordered society, developing a plan for children to go to school would have been a first priority once that bridge collapsed.

That brings us to a point made by new president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) Mrs La Sonja Harrison, published in the Sunday Observer.

She urged a “real conversation” by Jamaicans, and a decision as to the type of education we want for our children and how we will fund and get it done.

It seems to us that if Jamaicans and their leaders had a clear-cut, modern vision for education, crises such as children missing school because a collapsed bridge and/or because their parents are too poor to buy books, uniform, pay bus fare, et al, would be resolved as a matter of urgent national necessity.

As a country, as a people, we need to get serious.