Jones: Don’t turn schools into prisons
FORMER Minister of Education Ronald Jones is cautioning against turning the nation’s schools into prisons in response to the violent action in one of our secondary school’s which led to the stabbing death of a 16 year old student, at the hands of a 15 year old student earlier this month.
His comments came during a joint meeting of the Democratic Labour Party St. Philip branches on Sunday evening at the Princess Margaret School where he stated that the same way that it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a country to take care of its schools.
Jones said that instead of apportioning blame, the nation should be in prayer and seeking to find solutions, pointing out that there are already weapons in the school setting drawing reference to a knife or a chisel in Wood Work class or a knife that can be found in the Home Economics room. His observation came against the suggestion that metal detectors should be placed at schools.
“And I am making this point because sometimes we are silly people, so we get into a panic we run straight into a panic and turn the school into a prison when inside the same “prison”, every implement to do would work to do the Culinary Arts to do the Creative Arts are in the schools. So it is not the implement, it is the mind that is polluted,” he opined.
Jones told the packed Princess Margaret School Hall that some of these children do not have any direction and further investigations into their communities and homes would show how dire their situations are, particularly as it relates to neglect.
“Children scrambling to survive, working for people that are nefarious just to put on a pair of shoes... or pants or to get $5 to buy a little lunch you can understand and it is even worse now because all of the supportive agencies are being denied the resources to meet and to get into our homes.”
“It isn’t easy being poor... there are many children who couldn’t get that plate of food today.”
Jones challenges that there are a number of selfish and self-righteous persons who are not paying attention to these realities and charged that there is “triple standards” being seen in society, which is causing confusion in the minds of these young persons.
“I want us as a political party to remain conscious of Barbados first, party second, self [last] without Barbados there is no DLP there’s just a record a history. So whatever we do we fight for our nation and we fight for our nation we work through our party and our party works through us as a collective,” he told the party base. (JH)