Last month some serious flaws in what might loosely be termed the disciplinary aspects of the school system were exposed. There was firstly the case of the eight-year-old child who was severely injured by five of his classmates in the Mon Repos Primary School. Then there was the instance of a schoolboy who inflicted a severe beating on a female classmate in the Richard Ishmael Secondary School; and finally there was the physical assault on a teacher of the Winfer Gardens Primary School by a parent.
It was the second of these which brought none other than Minister of Education Dr Nicolette Henry into the institution concerned. She might not have gone at all had it not been for the fact that earlier she had remarked when asked about the incident that “students usually fight.” The case had already generated a storm of protest because a video had been shown on social media of the female student being hit, kicked and dragged, so when the Minister’s none-too-sensitive comment was added to the mix, the inevitable expressions of outrage followed.
So it was that shortly afterwards Dr Henry swanned into the Richard Ishmael on a damage control exercise telling the students at a special assembly that they should find other ways apart from violence to deal with differing views and conflicts. She was also reported to have adverted to the fact that certain behaviour was set out in school policy and that they should comply with this; deviations, she told them, would be firmly dealt with. Not this time, it seems.
Just for good measure the two students involved met with the Minister and were made to apologise to each other. This, one presumes, was before she had had any full report from the Welfare Department, but even if that was not so, it is difficult to comprehend how the Minister in her wisdom concluded that blame should be equally apportioned. Does it not occur to her that the beating of a girl by a boy on school premises simply cannot be tolerated by the authorities, no matter what the former said to the latter to eventuate in such a violent response? This kind of behaviour is a potential precursor to later domestic violence and has to be addressed immediately and probably on an ongoing basis, since it is symptomatic of an attitude which is all too embedded in certain segments of the male population of this society.
It was subsequently reported that both students were receiving counselling. There is nothing wrong with that, although as said above, the boy clearly has special issues which need to be confronted, possibly on a longer-term basis. It should be added that it seems likely that the sentiment of the student in question in relation to his female counterparts is probably replicated among other members of the male student body, and one seriously doubts that the Ministry of Education has any programme in place to reorient thinking in this regard.
One supposes that the case of little Richard Boodram of Mon Repos Primary, who was so brutally beaten by his classmates a month ago and is still hospitalised, has languished in semi-obscurity because there was no video of it to put on social media. Certainly the Minister has felt no compunction to make any public statement and neither, it seems, has she instructed any of her officials to do so. As for the Region Four educational bureaucracy, it might as well not exist for all it has had to say on the subject.
Ms Persaud, the boy’s mother, told this newspaper that Ministry of Education officials along with the Headmistress of Mon Repos visited her once, but that she has not seen them since. In addition, as a poor woman she has been put under huge financial stress as a consequence of having to find money for her son’s CT scans, although the Ministry of Public Health – not Education, which should be responsible – halved the cost of an MRI scan when she went to them for help.
Well it may be that the Minister feels that she is insulated from public criticism because there is no video on social media, but as head of the education sector the public, no less than Richard’s mother are entitled to some answers, including whether the matter has been handed to the police, and if not, why not? What exactly has been done about the five boys alleged to have been implicated in the attack? Are they still in the same school? Have they been suspended? Are they to be moved to another school? Has any remedial action been taken in relation to them? Are they even getting counselling?
And what about the school? This was not the first time Richard had been attacked, so clearly there is a culture of bullying at Mon Repos that the headmistress and the teaching staff do not have a grip on. Is the Ministry investigating the school? And if not, why not? Just what measures exactly does it have in mind to prevent a repetition of this kind of physical assault in this location?
Will the Minister who is taciturn on this issue together with her utterly uncommunicative officers please reassure all parents, and not just those whose children attend Mon Repos, that students are safe in the institutions run by education authorities, and that there are schemes in the offing to deal with bullying throughout the system. If they do not answer some questions then the inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that they have done nothing in the past, they are doing nothing now, and they will be doing nothing in the future because they are bereft of ideas. Silence in this instance is not golden, it is a sign of incompetence.
We addressed the matter of the attack on the Winfer Gardens Primary School teacher in a leader on Tuesday this week. Suffice it to observe here that the response from Ministry officials in this instance was altogether different than in the case cited immediately above, and officials did not shrink from speaking to reporters. To give one example, Assistant Chief Education Officer with responsibility for all primary schools Carol Benn said that the Ministry would “act and act swiftly.” Of course, the issues in this instance are very much simpler in terms of the action required from the authorities than in the case of the earlier mentioned incidents, necessitating as they do above all else enhanced security and the punctilious implementation of protocols.
The school environment is not what it used to be. There are drugs in schools, there are gangs in schools, there are children who are subject to little supervision at home, there are children who play violent video games or have smartphones and access to social media sites without superintendence, and there are many parents who are themselves poorly educated and see no point in education for their children. Barring interludes of major political violence such as those in the early sixties, we live in a far more violent, get-rich-quick society than did earlier generations, and education does not carry the kudos for everyone that it used to.
The challenges for meaningful responses to these new forces and circumstances within the school system are great, and it doesn’t appear on the face of it, at least, as if the Ministry of Education has made adaptations in its operations to cope with a different society and some of the disruptive social values which have come with it. It may be that it needs a major expansion in its Welfare department and a huge increase in the number of counsellors it can deploy. It certainly needs some kind of programme to deal with the new environment, and above all else to start with, a countrywide project to tackle bullying, which is at the bottom of many of the troubling issues in our schools.
