CHESTER SAM­BRA­NO

chester.sam­bra­no@guardian.co.tt

When the new school term opens on Sep­tem­ber 5, stu­dents will no longer be man­dat­ed to wear face masks.

In ad­di­tion, po­lice of­fi­cers will re­main sta­tioned at 17 se­lect­ed sec­ondary schools due to high amounts of school vi­o­lence.

These were some of the ma­jor an­nounce­ments made yes­ter­day, as the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion gets set to start the 2022/2023 aca­d­e­m­ic year.

In terms of curb­ing school vi­o­lence, an ini­tia­tive—which saw po­lice of­fi­cers be­ing placed in­side some schools while pa­trols were in­sti­tut­ed on the out­side—will con­tin­ue.

That be­gan in April this year amid in­creas­ing re­ports of vi­o­lence among stu­dents.

Speak­ing at a news con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly re­vealed that while the plan has borne fruit, it will con­tin­ue.

“These po­lice of­fi­cers are the ones who run the po­lice youth clubs and they have been en­cour­ag­ing stu­dents, not just to in­ter­act with them in the school set­ting but al­so in the com­mu­ni­ty set­ting, so we think it’s a quite pos­i­tive en­gage­ment and we look for­ward to the en­gage­ment,” she said.

How­ev­er, while this is be­ing done, the School Dis­ci­pli­nary Ma­trix is be­ing con­sid­ered by the Cab­i­net for ap­proval.

This ma­trix makes sev­er­al rec­om­men­da­tions on how to treat stu­dent of­fend­ers.

“Sus­pen­sion is in there, ex­pul­sion is in there as they were be­fore, but al­so in­clud­ed in that would be the restora­tion, al­so in­clud­ed in that would be that schools have to now en­cour­age pos­i­tive be­hav­iour; putting up sig­nage and so on in the dif­fer­ent schools, show­ing chil­dren how they are to be­have,” she said.

She said this is the rea­son why the teach­ing of life skills is now in­clud­ed in the cur­ricu­lum of 26 se­lect­ed schools in the first in­stance.

In June, a 15-year-old Form Two Williamsville Sec­ondary School stu­dent, who stabbed her fe­male school­mate, was ex­pelled from school.

On an­oth­er mat­ter, the min­istry has bud­get­ed $45 mil­lion for school re­pairs. It said there are 377 schools in ur­gent need of in­fra­struc­tur­al work but at this time, 130 are be­ing pri­ori­tised.

“We have quite a num­ber of schools still un­der re­pair and those vary in mag­ni­tude and so we ex­pect that as many that will be com­plet­ed by the time school opens and those that have to con­tin­ue, they will con­tin­ue on af­ter­noons and week­ends as is the usu­al case,” Min­is­ter Gads­by-Dol­ly said.

The Main­te­nance Train­ing and Se­cu­ri­ty (MTS) are the project man­agers for the re­pair works.

It was al­so dis­closed that 18,290 pieces of fur­ni­ture were de­liv­ered to 100 sec­ondary schools, while 3,222 pieces are be­ing sent to 130 pri­ma­ry schools. Ten­ders have al­so gone out for an ad­di­tion­al or­der of school fur­ni­ture and bids are cur­rent­ly be­ing eval­u­at­ed.

In terms of COVID-19 pro­to­cols when stu­dents re­turn to class­es, Chief Ed­u­ca­tion Of­fi­cer Dr Pe­ter Smith said masks will be “nec­es­sary but not manda­to­ry.”

Gads­by-Dol­ly stressed, how­ev­er, that while there is a min­istry pol­i­cy, prin­ci­pals will be giv­en the flex­i­bil­i­ty to man­date mask wear­ing in par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances.