ELIZ­A­BETH GON­ZA­LES

GML Cor­re­spon­dent

To­ba­go po­lice say the new School Ori­ent­ed Polic­ing Unit is run­ning smooth­ly and is not a bur­den on of­fi­cers at the To­ba­go Po­lice Di­vi­sion.

Snr Supt Earl Elie told Guardian Me­dia the pro­gramme be­gan on Mon­day at Ma­son Hall Sec­ondary and Sig­nal Hill Sec­ondary, with two of­fi­cers—one male and one fe­male—sta­tioned dai­ly at each school.

“As to the pro­gramme it­self, it was im­ple­ment­ed smooth­ly. We have two of­fi­cers as­signed to each school on a dai­ly ba­sis,” Elie con­firmed.

He said that un­like chal­lenges re­port­ed­ly faced dur­ing the roll­out in Trinidad, the To­ba­go mod­el has been well re­ceived.

“We have had no neg­a­tive feed­back as such. I think it’s all pos­i­tive. In fact, on Tues­day I per­son­al­ly vis­it­ed both schools … and all the oral feed­back was pos­i­tive,” he re­port­ed.

Elie not­ed that both stu­dents and teach­ers wel­comed the of­fi­cers.

“I spoke with both prin­ci­pals, along with the Sec­re­tary of Ed­u­ca­tion, Ms Hack­ett, and the As­sis­tant Com­mis­sion­er (Os­wain Subero), and all the oral feed­back was pos­i­tive,” he ex­plained.

The Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion, Re­search and Tech­nol­o­gy said the ini­tia­tive brings of­fi­cers to­geth­er with MTS guards and School Health and Safe­ty of­fi­cers.

In a re­lease, the Di­vi­sion said this cre­ates a wider sup­port net­work for dis­ci­pline and se­cu­ri­ty. It added that the part­ner­ship is al­ready help­ing prin­ci­pals and teach­ers man­age stu­dent be­hav­iour while pro­vid­ing a safer learn­ing en­vi­ron­ment.

The Di­vi­sion em­pha­sised that the po­lice pres­ence is not meant to pun­ish stu­dents but to sup­port schools. Sen­si­ti­sa­tion ses­sions with teach­ers, par­ents, and stu­dents al­so are be­ing held to build un­der­stand­ing of the ini­tia­tive.

Al­though the Di­vi­sion had iden­ti­fied the two schools as ones that some­times present chal­lenges, Elie said To­ba­go has not ex­pe­ri­enced the lev­el of school vi­o­lence record­ed in Trinidad.

“Those two schools ei­ther may have one or two re­ports of fight­ing with­in the last term or so, but noth­ing to see,” he said.

He added: “How­ev­er, the au­thor­i­ties thought it fit that those schools be in­clud­ed in the pro­gramme, and we are just do­ing what is re­quired of us as po­lice of­fi­cers.”

The Di­vi­sion added that the ini­tia­tive will be close­ly mon­i­tored, with talks al­ready un­der­way to ex­tend it to at least nine more schools across the is­land.