KAY-MARIE FLETCH­ER

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly says there’s been a sig­nif­i­cant de­crease in vi­o­lence at schools, de­spite videos on so­cial me­dia show­ing fights in and out­side school com­pounds.

Her com­ments come on the heels of two re­ports of school fights hap­pen­ing at the Moru­ga Sec­ondary School with­in weeks of each oth­er.

On Wednes­day, videos of fe­male stu­dents at the school in­volved in a vi­o­lent brawl be­gan cir­cu­lat­ing on so­cial me­dia.

Be­fore that, on Jan­u­ary 17, there was an­oth­er fight, this time in­volv­ing a male stu­dent and a male teacher.

This re­sult­ed in the teacher be­ing in­jured, and the stu­dent be­ing sus­pend­ed.

Speak­ing af­ter the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion’s Ex­cel­lence in Fo­cus awards cer­e­mo­ny at the head of­fice on St Vin­cent Street, Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, Gads­by-Dol­ly said to curb the in­frac­tions, prin­ci­pals have been en­cour­aged to take ad­van­tage of dis­ci­pli­nary mea­sures in­clud­ing sus­pend­ing stu­dents when need­ed.

“If we think back to 2022 when our stu­dents had just come back to school, you would recog­nise that there were a lot more vi­o­lent things hap­pen­ing at schools, but that has calmed down through our in­ter­ven­tions and al­so through stu­dents be­com­ing ac­cus­tomed back out at school as well. The re­la­tion­ship we have with the po­lice right now, of course, we ex­pect that will con­tin­ue and deep­en and strength­en.

“We are al­so en­cour­ag­ing the prin­ci­pals to use the dis­ci­pline ma­trix, use the sus­pen­sion sys­tem, use the restora­tive prac­tices so that the stu­dents un­der­stand there is a con­se­quence to bad be­hav­iour and there is some­thing that goes along,” the min­is­ter said.

She al­so de­nied ru­mours that the teacher in­volved in a fight with a stu­dent in Moru­ga had died.

In­stead, the Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter re­vealed the teacher has re­sumed du­ty at the school.

Asked if she plans to meet with the act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice, Ju­nior Ben­jamin, to dis­cuss school vi­o­lence, she said the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion has been work­ing with the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice since Gary Grif­fith was the com­mis­sion­er.

She al­so at­trib­uted the de­cline in vi­o­lence to po­lice pa­trols out­side schools and in­ter­ac­tion be­tween school of­fi­cials and com­mu­ni­ty po­lice.

She added, “There are stan­dard in­ter­ven­tions that we have al­ready made con­tact with the po­lice on. Ac­tu­al­ly, this is go­ing way back since the com­mis­sion­er was Gary Grif­fith and so there are stan­dard things we’ve asked for, pa­trols out­side some of our schools at the end of school, in­ter­ac­tion be­tween schools and the com­mu­ni­ty po­lice which is on­go­ing at this time, so there’s noth­ing at this point that is new that we are ask­ing for. As a mat­ter of fact, the col­lab­o­ra­tion with the po­lice has yield­ed good re­sults.”

With the de­cline in vi­o­lent in­ci­dents, Gads­by-Dol­ly said the min­istry is now fo­cus­ing on re­ward­ing good be­hav­iour and achieve­ments of stu­dents at some of these schools pre­vi­ous­ly known for school vi­o­lence.

Mean­while, stu­dents from 20 schools in fo­cus were award­ed for ex­cel­lence in non-aca­d­e­m­ic ini­tia­tives, such as sports, agri­cul­ture and com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice at the min­istry’s func­tion yes­ter­day.