School violence sparks resocialisation programmes

Amid a surge of violent conflicts in the island's secondary schools, Education Minister Fayval Williams has announced programmes to facilitate the resocialisation of students.

She said that the programmes are a necessary intervention as students have been away from the face-to-face environment for a long period. Linvern Wright, president of the Jamaica Association of Principals of Secondary Schools, welcomes the interventions.

"Anything being done to complement what's being done in schools is welcome," he said. "We just want to see the support agencies properly resourced to be able to give the kind of intense supervision of the students and counselling if needed. We just feel like the state agencies are not as equipped in terms of resources."

HORRIBLE STATE

He continued, "The rest of society is really in a horrible state now socially, violence-wise, and schools have to be coping with that because when everybody descends on schools, then all of these different values are there for us to deal with and it's a tough thing for teachers."

Wright is also the principal of William Knibb High School, where one student was stabbed to death by a schoolmate recently. When quizzed about the possible causes for the violence, Wright opined that schools are agents of socialisation and with students being away for two years, there was no counteraction to the influence of social media, music and the streets.

"Parents have had to be working and they [students] have just been on the streets, many of them. And that kind of aggression is something that stood out and hasn't been contained. And so the space of the school now has become really a sort of playground for them to demonstrate those things. You know that's one theory," he said. Wright said he is also looking forward to intervention from other stakeholders.

"It has to be a concerted effort. Programmes are really just meant to respond to what is happening, but the fact is what we really need is sustained attention from homes, sustained attention from parents. Help from communities, reinforcement from communities. We need everybody, we need taxi drivers, they ought to be a part of this whole thing. We need our music to be positive where the kids are concerned in terms of teaching them things. So it's a movement.