President of the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA), Keith Wellington, says the move to tighten rules that govern the transfer of students-athletes from overseas to Jamaican schools was done in the interest of encouraging schools to invest more in fostering local talent.

While aware that the onus is on the schools to decide how they expend limited resources, Wellington believes the amendments to the rules will serve as a push for those resources to be channeled toward developing Jamaica’s student-athletes.

ISSA, in a release on Tuesday, announced that foreign students with no family ties to Jamaica or whose families are not in the island as part of the diplomatic corps or United Nations convention will have to sit out a year, regardless of their ages. This means that students coming from secondary schools abroad are now subjected to the waiting period and will also now be regarded as members of the school's quota for each sport.

“If they started high school outside of Jamaica and come to Jamaica now, they are going to all be counted as quota players. Previously, it would have been that they had to be 16 or over to be regarded as quota players, but now they are,” Wellington told SportsMax.Tv during the ISSA Schoolboy football season’s launch at Stadium East on Wednesday.

That said, Wellington explained that overseas students who meet ISSA's eligibility criteria for Sixth Form Studies and are enrolled in Sixth Form at a member school will not be required to wait out a year but will still be deemed a member of the school's quota.

While the amendment, which is set to take effect on September 1, 2024, will impact those schools that rely on overseas students to bolster their respective sport programmes, particularly football and track and field, as students enrolled for the new academic year beginning in September will be affected.

Wellington stressed that the decision arrived at by various principals was necessary for the development of Jamaica’s student-athletes and the country, as there has been an explosion of overseas athletes coming to the island, some from as far as Africa.

“Part of our responsibility as principals is to develop our nation's children. We have to focus on ensuring that they benefit from what the schools have to offer, and so we feel that there comes a time when we have to ensure that the resources—the limited resources that many of our schools have—must be properly channeled toward what our objectives are,” Wellington shared.

“And so what we have done is to not prevent persons from coming to Jamaica to study or to participate in our activities, but to put a cap and a restriction on how many can go to one particular school. That way, we don't have one school spending an inordinate proportion of their resources on non-Jamaicans who have no obligation to contribute to Jamaica's development, whether directly in sports or through whatever aspect of life. So, as principals, that is why we arrived at that decision,” he added.