THERE ARE again mounting concerns about the issue of violence in schools following separate incidents in Manchester and St. Andrew last week.
At the Snowdon Basic School near Newport in south Manchester, principal Ionie Richards and her students are still traumatised following Friday's daring knife attack on the educator. A third form student of Jamaica College in St. Andrew is recovering in hospital from a stab wound inflicted by a fifth form schoolmate. The fifth form student has been charged with felonious wounding.
SERIOUS TIMES
"We are in serious times," Travert Spence, president of the Manchester Principals' Association, said yesterday, noting that security was becoming a major problem at many schools.
Mrs. Richards was at school about 12:30 p.m. when a man entered the building and attacked her with a knife. During a struggle, he inflicted several wounds to her upper body, in front of her class of 10 students, five of whom were three years old, the others five years old.
According to the police, the attacker escaped with the principal's bag containing personal items, school keys and the institution's account records.
"It is difficult ... I don't know how I am going to feel when I go back into the classroom," Mrs. Richards told The Gleaner shortly after returning from a counselling session at the Victim Support Unit in Mandeville yesterday.
But she was even more concerned about the infants who witnessed the ordeal, some of whom are reportedly afraid of returning to school. "Some of them are (also) having problems sleeping," she said.
COUNSELLING
However, Education Minister Maxine Henry-Wilson said she was expecting that the ministry's Guidance and Counselling Unit through its Region Five offices in Mandeville would assist with the counselling of the students and the principal. Nonetheless, the school will remain closed this week.
And responding to suggestions for the expansion of the government's Safe Schools Programme involving the placement of police personnel in selected schools, Mrs. Henry-Wilson said there were not enough trained police personnel to facilitate this. Instead, she said communities must play a greater role in encouraging the security of schools.
POLICE PERSONNEL IN SCHOOLS
Under the programme, Jamaica College is among the institutions that have been assigned police personnel called School Resource Officers (SRO), however, none were at the school during last Friday's attack.
But according to Lieutenant Colonel Oral Khan, the officer in charge of the Safe Schools initiative, the programme was not intended to have an officer at the schools throughout the day.
In 2003, it cost the government more than $20 million to provide health care for students who were admitted to hospital as a result of violence in schools.
