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Saturday, July 12, 2025

Increased security for Santa Rosa school as intruder still at large

by

Anna-Lisa Paul
18 days ago
20250624
 The Santa Rosa Government Primary School

The Santa Rosa Government Primary School

As the po­lice in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to an in­ci­dent at the San­ta Rosa Gov­ern­ment Pri­ma­ry School two weeks ago con­tin­ues, se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures have been ad­just­ed to en­sure the safe­ty of the staff and stu­dents.

A se­nior po­lice of­fi­cial yes­ter­day con­firmed of­fi­cers had in­tro­duced a dai­ly check-in sys­tem with the school’s ad­min­is­tra­tion, along with in­creased pa­trols in and around the Pin­to Road, Ari­ma, com­mu­ni­ty.

Mean­while, the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion (MoE) al­so con­firmed it had un­der­tak­en a com­pre­hen­sive re­view of the school’s in­fra­struc­ture and ex­ist­ing se­cu­ri­ty poli­cies, af­ter it was claimed an in­trud­er had gained ac­cess to the com­pound via a hole in the perime­ter fenc­ing.

While in­ves­ti­ga­tors have not yet ap­pre­hend­ed the sus­pect be­cause of the “gener­ic” de­scrip­tion pro­vid­ed, the po­lice of­fi­cial as­sured this had not pre­vent­ed law en­force­ment agents from as­sum­ing a greater re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to make those work­ing at and at­tend­ing the fa­cil­i­ty feel safer.

Not­ing there were no se­cu­ri­ty cam­eras at the school, the of­fi­cial said they were de­pend­ing on footage cap­tured by those liv­ing near­by in or­der to iden­ti­fy and lo­cate the sus­pect.

“The po­lice have tak­en an ac­tive role in en­sur­ing the se­cu­ri­ty of the school is main­tained,” the of­fi­cial as­sured.

Dis­put­ing the date cit­ed for when the in­ci­dent would have oc­curred, the MoE claimed it hap­pened around 7.20 am on June 10, and not June 2, as was pre­vi­ous­ly claimed.

It was al­leged that a male sus­pect told the guard on du­ty he was an On-the-Job (OJT) mu­sic teacher and lat­er locked him­self in a store­room with sev­er­al fe­male stu­dents and made sex­u­al ad­vances to some of them in re­turn for mon­ey.

The po­lice con­firmed the in­for­ma­tion, as they said the sus­pect tricked the guard in­to be­liev­ing he had a right to be on the com­pound un­til a teacher was alert­ed and she raised an alarm, forc­ing the sus­pect to flee.

Both the po­lice and Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Michael Dowlath said the staff and stu­dents con­tin­ue to be treat­ed to pub­lic sen­si­ti­sa­tion ses­sions on how they could iden­ti­fy le­git­i­mate vis­i­tors to the school and how they should act when and if ap­proached by strangers.

The MoE added that it had un­der­tak­en a re­view of the school’s cri­sis man­age­ment sys­tem so that the emer­gency drill will al­so in­clude a lock­down.

The Na­tion­al Par­ent Teacher As­so­ci­a­tion (NPTA) and T&T Uni­fied Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTUTA) round­ly con­demned the trau­ma­tis­ing in­ci­dent, which they said had breached safe­ty pro­to­cols and re­sult­ed in the staff and stu­dents be­ing placed in a vul­ner­a­ble and fright­en­ing po­si­tion.


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