It would have been pure theatre were it not so decidedly worrisome. The fact that there appears to have been no country-wide collective expression of alarm over last week’s disclosure that an assortment of knives, scissors and various other instruments that can serve as lethal weapons was found at the Tutorial High School is troubling.
The Department of Education Schools’ Wel-fare Unit (Georgetown) carried out a search on January 25th and found the prohibited items. That the various implements were found, in the bags of children attending the school, ought to be a matter of profound worry, not just to the education system, but to the country as a whole.
The items discovered in the assorted handbags, haversacks et al., of students of Tutorial High School points unerringly to the reality that the security system at this school is badly fractured and it is unlikely that Minister Manickchand is the one to ‘fix’ it. She has become too steeped in the practice of knee-jerk evasiveness and blame-shifting, seemingly refusing to recognize that the paradigms of her portfolio demand that, at the very least, she take a more generous measure of responsibility.
The recent find at Tutorial has coincided with the descent of some of our schools into battle zones and where there have been instances of injury, and worse. Contextually, we can no longer ‘dance around’ the reality that both the Minister and the Ministry are palpably out of their depths insofar as effectively addressing the problem. As harsh as it might seem, the situation has become sufficiently worrisome for the President to enter into the fray. It is either that or we continue to watch what is now an ensuing free-for-all in our school system.
On November 27th last year, 11-year-old Mark Harrypaul succumbed to a head injury after a gate was slammed into him at the Strathspey Primary School by another boy. It was evidence of an utter breakdown in safeguarding the life of this student. It has been cast as an accident and apparently the bereaved parents have to live with that.
Sushmita Singh, the aggrieved mother of the dead child, told this newspaper that the other boy involved in the incident was a 14-year-old student of Buxton Secondary School who would frequently go to the primary school and bully the pupils there. This she said was told to her by other parents who came forward the next day to express their concern about the incident. As far as this newspaper is aware, neither the school, nor the ministry has delved further into whether the older student had breached the security of the primary school on more than one occasion.
As chronicled in the Sunday Stabroek of January 21st , the aspiration to one day write the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examination remains alive for Jamal Reid as he battles with the changes to his physical and mental condition as a result of violence at his school.
Life changed for Jamal after an altercation with another student over a School Based Assessment which first resulted in threats on social media and ended with him being struck in the head with a cricket bat at Golden Grove Secondary School on November 9 last year. Jamal was at the time anxiously preparing for his CSEC exams, and his mother, Holly Bess, was overjoyed because Jamal was given an opportunity that she never had. However, when Jamal was hospitalized, his family was greeted with the diagnosis that he had sustained a fractured skull which resulted in brain damage.
His mother said: “It is his desire to do CXC and it never die, but because of his current condition, we are skeptical. The doctor say not to pressure his brain… I just want the best for my children and as a single parent, I was working so hard for Jamal now look what happen. So now [he] is like a baby again, I’m frustrated… this is not what I want. I raised him for so many years, now for this to happen.”
Ms Bess, a single mother of three, said she has worked tirelessly to send her children to school and be given a chance to become career driven. Since the incident, Ms Bess has found herself jobless and now depends on her 20-year-old daughter and sometimes Jamal’s father.
At various levels of the society, we have come around to accepting the reality of schools as battle zones and that at the levels of homes, internal schools’ administration and the state-run mechanisms responsible for creating and sustaining a convivial teaching/learning environment, there exists a seeming resignation to the reality that, for the present, at least, we have not been able to fashion the requisite ‘tools’ to cause the crisis to go away. We must make no mistake about it; where violence in schools is concerned it has been a matter of the delinquents and their various backers winning… at least up until now. If nothing decisive is done, and now, we are going to lose our children and our schools to pockets of turmoil that will inevitably become part of a wider societal problem. This is what is at stake here.
This editorial is ‘calling out’ the Minister of Education for no other reason than that nothing that she has done (or not done) appears to have made a positive impact on violence in the school system. There is meant to be a pilot programme in place to improve security but radical action across the entire school system is required now.
Seemingly progressively depleted public confidence in the public schools’ system’s ability to meet its obligations to the society is, in considerable measure, a reaction to the disintegration of disciplinary mechanisms and in some instances (perhaps more than we think) the ‘takeover’ of schools by violent ‘bully gangs.’ It is pointless even raising the issue of effective education delivery if we cannot properly address these issues and the available evidence (instances like the recent Tutorial High School find) suggest that, at least up to this point, the Minister and her methods are losing the battle.
