Unfortunately, another report in The Royal Gazette has highlighted some concerning news about Bermuda’s public education system.

According to chief reporter Sarah Lagan, testing conducted between 2020 and 2023 showed that more than half of Bermuda’s public school students were reading below their grade level.

Now, I appreciate the Ministry of Education pointing out that this testing took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, which undoubtedly disrupted learning. But I’m not convinced we can attribute these results entirely to Covid. Our education system faced challenges long before the pandemic, and we need to understand how much progress has been made since these assessments.

While we continue debating education reform, who should be in charge and how much money should be spent, I sometimes wonder whether we’re losing sight of the people who matter most, our educators and students.

This isn’t a time for finger pointing. It’s a time for us to dig deeper, understand where students are struggling and figure out how to improve their outcomes, and quickly.

I’ve said it before, what we put into our young people today is what we’ll get out of them tomorrow. These are the individuals who will eventually replace us in the workforce, lead our institutions and help care for an aging population. Their success is imperative.

Education can’t be the responsibility of teachers and schools alone. Parents, businesses, community organizations and the rest of us have a role to play. That role could be creating educational trivia games around subjects young people enjoy, incorporating more learning into extracurricular activities or just encouraging reading and curiosity outside the classroom.

We don’t all have to be educators to contribute to a child’s education. I don’t believe another debate about the structure of our education system is enough. We need to know what support students are receiving today, whether it’s working and how we can help.

Our young people can’t afford to wait for us to get everything else figured out.