Matthew Chin

Re­porter

matthew.chin@guardian.co.tt

El Do­ra­do West Sec­ondary School stu­dents and staff took to the streets yes­ter­day to make their voic­es heard on the crime sit­u­a­tion in the coun­try.

Prin­ci­pal Anne-Marie Per­sads­ingh said the pur­pose of the peace walk was to make a state­ment that young peo­ple will be part of the so­lu­tion to lead T&T out of the dark­ness.

“Our pur­pose is peace, we are stu­dents of peace. We are mak­ing a state­ment against vi­o­lence and we are say­ing that while there’s a lot of neg­a­tiv­i­ty in schools, we be­lieve in the ini­tia­tive of the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion that stu­dents and school teach­ers have the so­lu­tion to make Trinidad and To­ba­go a bet­ter place and that is what we’re about to­day,” she said.

The stu­dents, ac­com­pa­nied by moko jumbies, walked through the streets of their com­mu­ni­ty car­ry­ing plac­ards with mes­sages that in­clud­ed “Stop Crime”, “Stop Cy­ber­bul­ly­ing” and “Say No To Vi­o­lence”.

Per­sads­ingh said the school is tak­ing a “club ver­sus gang” ap­proach to the de­vel­op­ment of the stu­dents, with more than 40 clubs cater­ing to their per­son­al growth.

She said, “We are the on­ly school in Trinidad and To­ba­go and the Caribbean that has a sci­ence project ini­tia­tive where we have trav­elled to NASA’s space cen­tre every year for the last ten years.”

On Tues­day night, school rep­re­sen­ta­tives joined com­mu­ni­ty stake­hold­ers, the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty and of­fi­cers from the Tu­na­puna Po­lice Sta­tion at a meet­ing to dis­cuss ways to com­bat crime.

“We are aware of the crime sit­u­a­tion. If we sit back and do noth­ing, then we are say­ing we’re sat­is­fied with what is go­ing on. That is why we’re say­ing we are mak­ing a dif­fer­ence by mak­ing a pos­i­tive state­ment that we are the fu­ture and we are the an­swer,” Per­sads­ingh said.