Long before last Saturday’s St. Joseph High School ‘Fair of the Year’ came to an inglorious end on Sunday morning the available evidence had been pointing unerringly to the likelihood that it could descend into something ugly.
By 9 pm on Saturday, parents, chastened by the precedent of a previous function were hustling their children through the school’s main gate and away from the foreboding darkness of Woolford Avenue. Simultaneously, the ‘night people’, mostly coarse young men who, by their appearance, had clearly long left their school days behind, had begun to assemble across the street, outside North Georgetown Secondary School, ‘taking in’ the blaring music and eyeing up the still crowded St. Joseph’s playground.
By 9 pm any bona fide School Fair should at worst, be winding down. This was not the case at St. Joseph on Saturday evening. At 9 pm animated hustlers were loudly hawking tickets for entry into the Fair ground, (it would be interesting to learn the source (s) of those tickets) asking $200 above the advertised price; the crush at the gate was becoming increasingly frenetic with the night-time party goers pushing back against the wave of what seemed like parents and their children seeking to get home. The lone security guard at the gate was clearly not coping. Even at that early stage the portents were ominously clear.
The promoters of the event, the School’s Parent-Teachers Association had caused the duration of the event to be advertised as ‘from 2:00 pm – ?’ which in entertainment language is usually taken to mean some time the next day. It is music to the ears of the bona fide nocturnal revellers. By 9 pm the St. Joseph’s Fair appeared to be heading unerringly in the wrong direction.
These PTA-sponsored events are usually serious fund-raising affairs. They are, in large measure, a reflection of just how under-funded our state schools are. The patronage that they attract, however, can turn out to be a poisoned chalice and Saturday evening was not St. Joseph first experience.
The PTA may have been ‘stood up’ by the police and it is for the Force to respond to the claim made in the PTA’s media release. Our question, however, has to do with what we believe is a much more pertinent issue… the wisdom of PTAs staging these open-ended entertainment events knowing as they ought to that with the passage of time and the attentions of the ‘wrong crowd’ an innocent fund-raiser can eventually descend into something ugly, or worse.
That is precisely what happened once the Fair had stopped being a Fair and had descended into something quite different. On Saturday night/ Sunday morning, on a narrow and desperately deserted Woolford Avenue, the brigands had their way.
The fault, truth be told, lies with the organizers, the people who failed to put a particular time limit on what, after all, was advertised as a Fair not a Bacchanal. It was, to say the least, an act of less than sound judgement, a circumstance that is by no means mitigated by what the organizers say was the failure of the police to provide the service for which they paid.
And even if the occurrences of Saturday night/ Sunday morning may not warrant a full-fledged Commission of Inquiry, a clear cut and enforceable policy on school-related entertainment ought, surely, to be laid down by the Ministry of Education before School Fairs descend into a condition of complete disrepute.
