A 13-year-old student of the Golden Grove Secondary School was yesterday hit in the head with a piece of wood by another student after an inappropriate touching incident.
The family of Ricardo Stephen is calling for a full investigation into the events, which they blamed on a lack of supervision by teachers who were at the time dealing with school sports.
Stephen, a second form student, was taken to the Enmore Health Centre by a teacher several hours after the incident occurred.
Stabroek News was unable to make contact with the school’s headmistress for a comment.
Stephen recounted that he was at school when a third form girl “pinch my buttocks and I hit her back on her buttocks and she pick up a wood and hit me in my head.” As a result of the blow, the teen sustained a deep gash to the side of his head, which bled profusely.
Stephen added that the girl then walked back to her class and he immediately went to his teacher who was in another room looking at primary-level sports. The lower school is situated in the same building with the secondary tier of the school. Stephen said that his teacher sent him to his headmistress and another teacher subsequently came and wiped the wound with a piece of cotton wool before putting ice. The headmistress, he recalled, then told him to go outside and wait but he decided to go to the home of a relative nearby. There, the wound was once again tended to and he was given a clean shirt. Relatives contacted his uncle, Dewayne while he walked back to school.
The teen added that a teacher later took him to the Enmore Health Centre.
According to Stephen, the girl was always in the habit of bothering him. This newspaper has since learnt that she was told numerous times by the teen’s teacher to leave the class as she was often there. He added that at the time of the incident no teacher was around.
Meanwhile, Dewayne said that he was upset at the headmistress for the way she handled the incident and her inability to properly brief him more than an hour after the incident occurred. He called on education officials to visit the school and investigate the conduct of teachers and pupils since that was not the first time that a student displayed violence towards another. “I went to the school and I spoke to the HM [headmistress] but she was so defensive.
She couldn’t even tell me what transpired,” he said. The man said that after he was not getting any satisfactory response from the headmistress, he walked out of her office. He alleged that the head teacher told him that the teen could sit and wait some more, since his wound was not very serious. “Apparently to her the sports was more important. I think that education officials need to go in there and carry out an investigation to see if the teachers are performing their duties,” the upset man stressed.
Meanwhile, Stephen’s grandmother Paulette when contacted yesterday was shocked that she was not informed of the incident by school officials.
The woman said that her grandson was injured and taken to the hospital and she did not know. “It could have been worse. Teachers are the second grandmothers for children.
They are under their care,” she said before questioning where the teacher supervision was at the time of the incident. “Ricardo was not unconscious so why didn’t someone try to get a number from him and contact me? I thank God that it wasn’t worse,” she added.
Paulette planned to visit the school today to get the girl’s version of events.
