WhitemanONE HUNDRED and 80 boys, between 15 and 17 years old from Montego Bay, Kingston and St. Andrew, will head out to 'truancy camp' in Nutshell, Trelawny, this Saturday to be disciplined.
The camp, an initiative from the Ministry of Education and the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce runs until September 25, and should teach the boys - all of whom have been recommended because of behavioural problems - proper discipline.
Acting executive director of the National Youth Service, through which the camp is being offered, the Rev. Adinhair Jones said that the camp is to assist students who have been having problems with absenteeism linked to conduct disorder in schools and the deeper problem of learning disability. The camp is at no cost to the participants.
"Our approach has been to contact the schools with which these problems have been coming up and ask the guidance counsellors to send us those particular students who are borderline in relation to performance and in relation to conduct," Rev. Jones said yesterday. "We'll put them in the one-month camp with a solid infrastructure of persons trained in social psychology."
The aim is to help the boys deal with behavioural problems and ensure that they come out with a sense of why they have not been attending school and why they are underperforming.
"The methodology is to engage parents, put the boys in the facility and expose them to different elements within the training concept," Rev. Jones said.
The boys will then be reintegrated in the school system and provided with mentoring and ongoing workshops for the duration of the school year.
Stemming from an increase in the incidence of violence in schools some months ago, sections of the society including guidance counsellors strongly supported the establishment of 'boot camps' or 'facilities for behavioural change' as a means of solving the growing crisis of violence in schools. The Jamaica Teachers Association (JTA) also supported a Ministry of Education call to address the problem of violence in schools by setting up special institutions to accommodate students who were seen as a threat to teachers and other students. At that time (May this year), the JTA reported at least 40 cases of violence occasioning bodily harm in schools for the 2001/2002 academic year, with four in one week.
Education Minister Burchell Whiteman, said however, that the approach "cannot be just simply seeking what people would call the boot camp approach which seeks to force discipline on to people".
"What this process (truancy camp) does is to analyse each individual and to look at the interventions that will respond to each particular case," he said. "Some of them may not be rescued by this, but they would have had an opportunity. Modern psychology suggests that there are some things that you really cannot change by just enforcement without diagnosing the root cause of the problem."
The truancy camps, he said, offer a ore clinically responsible approach than what people describe as the boot camp.
The camp is to complement the mechanisms under the Programme for Advancement Through Health and Education (PATH) programme which is expected to help needy students in December.
The PATH programme is being piloted in St. Catherine where Mr. Whiteman said that the Ministry of Labour and Social Security has been seeking to qualify and register the parents who were to benefit.
"They have substantially completed that work," he said. "The programme has identified all the students on their assessment who would qualify for full assistance from the Government and those lists have been made available. There were some initial hitches but we understand that that process is going ahead well, all things considered we believe that we are in pretty good shape."
