Zero tolerance for attacks on teachers
Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley has made it clear any attacks on teachers by students will not be tolerated.
Speaking to the media on Saturday night after marathon talks with what she described as a standing committee aimed at addressing issues within schools, she asserted unequivocally that acts of student on teacher violence was unacceptable in any form.
“There can be no tolerance in this country for any child to believe that they are in any position to threaten or to attack any teacher or even their parents or any adult in this country. If we allow this to happen, we will be surrendering our country to lawlessness at a very, very wrong time and to young people who will not come to appreciate their behaviour is unacceptable in any form. There will be a zero tolerance policy to those who believe they can threaten teachers in the system,” Mottley stated unequivocally.
Insisting children involved in such cases should not be written off as their behaviours could be corrected, the Prime Minister said that immediately a day facility would be created to concentrate on this effort, with the intention of having it morph into a residential one for periods of over three weeks.
“The government will work immediately to create what was always intended to be an appropriately skilled residential facility to move and build upon the work of Edna Nicholls as I am told the Edna Nicholls Centre is now stretched and therefore will require an additional review … The one thing you do not want to do is send a child on suspension and they remain at home or in the community doing nothing,” she added.
She disclosed that the Education Ministry would be implementing legislation where children can enter the facility by parents’ requests or in the absence of such consent, through the request of the Chief Education Officer following talks with psychologists and school principals.
“This is not a case of anybody with a conviction going to Dodds, or the Government Industrial School; this is a case where we try and prevent them from ever going to these,” she stressed.
In addition, both the police force and Barbados Defence Force would be stepping up patrols around several schools.
The gathering at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre included Education Ministry officials, representatives each of the teachers’ unions and principals’ associations including: the Barbados Secondary Teachers’ Union, the Barbados Union of Teachers, the Association of Public Primary School Principals and the Barbados Association of Principals of Secondary Schools, several other ministers and youth affairs officials, Police Commissioner Tyrone Griffith and BDF Chief of Staff Colonel Glyne Grannum. (JMB)