KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

Se­cu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties at San Juan North Sec­ondary School had been iden­ti­fied and re­port­ed be­fore an unau­tho­rised per­son en­tered the com­pound and robbed a mem­ber of staff last Thurs­day, ac­cord­ing to the Es­tate Po­lice As­so­ci­a­tion (EPA).

The as­so­ci­a­tion said its Na­tion­al Main­te­nance Train­ing and Se­cu­ri­ty Com­pa­ny Ltd (MTS) branch board had pre­vi­ous­ly con­duct­ed a se­cu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty as­sess­ment which iden­ti­fied the school as re­quir­ing ur­gent at­ten­tion be­cause of its lo­ca­tion and in­ad­e­quate phys­i­cal se­cu­ri­ty in­fra­struc­ture.

Among the de­fi­cien­cies iden­ti­fied were high bush­es, holes and weak­ness­es in the perime­ter fenc­ing, poor light­ing and oth­er vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties.

The EPA said those con­cerns were re­port­ed to MTS man­age­ment, while the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty as­sess­ments were al­so pro­vid­ed to the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion for ac­tion.

The as­so­ci­a­tion’s state­ment comes days af­ter the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry said it had ini­ti­at­ed emer­gency works at the school fol­low­ing the in­ci­dent, which in­volved the en­try of an unau­tho­rised in­di­vid­ual on­to the com­pound and the re­port­ed rob­bery of per­son­al prop­er­ty from a mem­ber of staff.

The min­istry said in ad­di­tion to emer­gency works, the MTS had been en­gaged to un­der­take re­me­di­al works to strength­en the school’s phys­i­cal se­cu­ri­ty.

The min­istry said San Juan North has MTS se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cers de­ployed at full com­ple­ment, in­clud­ing su­per­vi­so­ry over­sight by a cor­po­ral, while School-Ori­ent­ed Po­lice Of­fi­cers are al­so as­signed to the school.

But the EPA is warn­ing against mak­ing MTS es­tate of­fi­cers the sole fo­cus of the re­sponse.

“The knee-jerk re­ac­tion to sim­ply blame the MTS Es­tate Po­lice Of­fi­cers must be bal­anced against the wider se­cu­ri­ty con­di­tions at the school,” EPA pres­i­dent Deryck Richard­son said.

The as­so­ci­a­tion said the pres­ence of State Po­lice does not elim­i­nate the need for prop­er phys­i­cal se­cu­ri­ty.

It said a com­pound with in­ad­e­quate fenc­ing, poor light­ing, over­grown veg­e­ta­tion and oth­er vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties could re­main ex­posed re­gard­less of the num­ber of of­fi­cers as­signed to it.

The EPA is call­ing for re­in­forced fenc­ing, prop­er se­cu­ri­ty light­ing, con­trolled ac­cess and CCTV mon­i­tor­ing of vul­ner­a­ble ar­eas.

It al­so said schools now face se­cu­ri­ty chal­lenges that did not ex­ist when many of them were de­signed.

The EPA said the pri­or­i­ty must re­main the pro­tec­tion of stu­dents and teach­ers and warned against treat­ing of­fi­cers as scape­goats for de­fi­cien­cies it said had al­ready been iden­ti­fied and doc­u­ment­ed.

The Min­istry, mean­while, said its Health, Safe­ty and Se­cu­ri­ty Ser­vices Unit had re­viewed the school’s se­cu­ri­ty pro­to­cols and would con­tin­ue as­sess­ing the arrange­ments, with mea­sures to be ad­just­ed and strength­ened where nec­es­sary.