It was interesting to learn about the Ministry of Education’s recent Drug Prevention Education Training forum through a news report in last Friday’s edition of this paper which stated, among other things, that the forum targeted “teachers and welfare officers from Georgetown.”
The initiative, one assumes, derives from the challenge of drug use and abuse which, from reports, has become prevalent in some of our schools and which, up until now, we have been more-or-less unable to reverse.
One accepts, of course, that we have to begin somewhere in terms of trying to reduce if not altogether remove drugs from our schools, though there is no persuasive evidence that anywhere near enough has been done by the Ministry of Education up to this time.
According to Chief Schools Welfare Officer Gillian Vyphuis the prevalence of drug use in our schools is 5 %. That, in itself is a shocking statistic, as is the disclosure that children are taking alcohol into the “school system.” The Ministry of Education must therefore tell us about the action that it has taken to roll back these worrisome developments and what have been their outcomes.
The presence of drugs and alcohol in our schools is largely a function of inadequate schools’ management, It is, first and foremost, a security consideration and while no one underestimates the magnitude of the challenge, it has to do largely with the efficiency – or lack thereof – of the security protocols put in place both by the Ministry of Education and, on a school by school basis, by the schools themselves, as well as with the degree of rigidity with which those protocols are enforced.
We know from the types and frequency of the transgressions that occur in schools that in quite a number of cases security arrangements in schools are pretty ‘free and easy,’ allowing children generous latitude to transgress in all sorts of ways. We know too that among the best known of these transgressions is the proliferation of weapons in schools. It does not appear that the Ministry of Education has been able to remove or even significantly reduce this particular transgression.
While programmes that help teachers to contribute to drug prevention and counselling in schools can be useful, such programmes have to be attended by support initiatives that speak to the multi-faceted nature of the drug problem. Beyond the issue of use and abuse there is also the matter of the pedalling of drugs which, we know, has occurred on some school premises. One assumes that the Ministry of Education does not need reminding that apart from being untrained or undertrained to deal with drug-related issues in schools, teachers involved in helping to tackle the drug problem can become even more exposed to the seamier side of the drug problem which might well place them in personal danger. We say this not to sound alarmist, but to provide what we believe might be timely and useful illumination of a serious issue.
Under both the current Minister and her predecessor, a song and dance has been made whenever an unsavory incident occurs, whether it be school-related violence, acts of aggression that target teachers or any of the various other outrageous transgressions that manifest themselves these days. It is not this newspaper’s view, however, that there is, invariably, a great deal of appropriate remedial action by the Ministry of Education beyond the high level ‘fair promises’ to take action in the immediate aftermath of the transgressions.
Punitive action against individual transgressors is not enough. The ministry, unfortunately, has not been seen to be continually upgrading its disciplinary rules and regulations to match the evolving discipline-related challenges in the school system. Sometimes, for all the experience and layers of experienced bureaucrats that it has at its disposal, it appears to be afflicted with an acute shortage of ideas as to how best to tackle these problems.
We believe, for example, that while all of the blame for the breakdown of discipline in parts of the school system cannot be laid at the feet of heads of schools, there is something to be said for the development of management programmes specifically tailored to help heads (and their staff) cope with the changing patterns of disciplinary culture in our schools. Where is the evidence that the Ministry of Education has been pursuing such a course of action?
One sometimes gets the impression that those officials responsible for addressing some of the outrageous transgressions that occur in schools (and/or amongst schoolchildren) these days understand only too well, that the public memory on even the most serious of occurrences hardly if ever extends beyond a brief period. That fact allows for the promises of remedial action which those who make them are under no great pressure to keep.
The fact that we have been unable, in many instances, to provide safe spaces for the delivery of education is a circumstance that the Ministry of Education should worry about, and if last week’s forum for teachers and welfare officers on Drug Prevention Education might be a helpful initiative on its own, it is but a drop in a vast ocean. Given what might be the scale of the drugs and alcohol use in schools one is inclined to ask whether last week’s exercise is one of those ‘one-day wonders’ (two days in this instance) which are often proffered as complete remedies but which are intended to serve as no more than attention-getters, or whether it will be replicated beyond Region Four and even beyond coastal Guyana. After all, there may well be schools across the country where, for all we know, drug and alcohol use may be equally prevalent, so that unless what happened last week in Georgetown is a precursor of a wider initiative to use teachers across the country as another line of defence against the proliferation of drugs and alcohol in our schools, it would hardly have been worth the time and trouble in the first place.
Not for the first time we consider it necessary to remind the Ministry of Education that many of the challenges confronting our school system can only be remedied with the considerable involvement and support of parents. Accordingly, initiatives that have to do with drug and alcohol use must become the subject of discourses that involve parents. The fact of the matter – and tragic though it is – is that some children come from homes and communities that provide sustained exposure to drugs and alcohol. It therefore makes every sense to broaden the discourses to involve parents. Truth be told, it would be an exercise in profound folly to assume that initiatives taken at the level of the school can overcome the deeply-rooted ‘orientation’ of urban ‘drug yards’ and, by extension, ‘drug houses’ whose occupants include schoolchildren.
Accordingly, issues like drug and alcohol proliferation in schools must become the subject of conferences and workshops that include parents and must be extended to communities across Guyana. We have seen no serious evidence of the ministry moving in those directions. At the same time there is a need to significantly strengthen the Parent/Teacher Association regime in our schools and to use this as fora for tackling issues of the nature of drug and alcohol use by schoolchildren.
In this context and at the risk of seeming to reach for the familiar we-told-you-so refrain, it is apposite to remind the Ministry of Education of this newspaper’s previous call for the creation of a ‘contract’ between parents and teachers that would allow for far more effective management of schools. Whether we like it or not, parents are equally influential stakeholders in ensuring that our schools are well run, and whether the issue ranges from the one extreme of neglecting to do homework to the other of ‘smoking a joint’ in the school’s rest room, parental involvement is critical to the remedial process. The Ministry of Education is simply incapable of overcoming these challenges on its own.
