The Scar­bor­ough Sec­ondary School, as well as the Lam­beau An­gli­can Pri­ma­ry School, re­opened to­day, af­ter be­ing closed since Ash Wednes­day.

The Di­vi­sion of Ed­u­ca­tion, Re­search & Tech­nol­o­gy took the de­ci­sion to close the schools from Feb­ru­ary 14, 2024, due to con­cerns about the air qual­i­ty in the area fol­low­ing the re­cent oil spill.

Stu­dents were en­gaged in on­line class­es dur­ing the in­ter­im but have been giv­en the green light to re­turn to school.  How­ev­er, while TTUTA wel­comes the schools’ re­open­ing, its To­ba­go rep­re­sen­ta­tive Bradon Roberts is hop­ing that the de­ci­sion was well thought out, and that safe­ty is not be­ing com­pro­mised.

“We are grate­ful the schools are re­opened, and our stu­dents can get back to that face-to-face class­room in­ter­ac­tion, trust­ing that school was able to func­tion to­day, and that it was not a rushed de­ci­sion,” he said.

And the TTUTA To­ba­go rep­re­sen­ta­tive is con­cerned that school vi­o­lence re­mains an is­sue in both Trinidad and To­ba­go.  He says while cell phone record­ings have brought the is­sue to light, it has been hap­pen­ing long be­fore.

Bradon Roberts is call­ing for a psy­cho­log­i­cal ap­proach to deal­ing with vi­o­lence among chil­dren.

“Psy­chol­o­gy is more im­por­tant than log­ic,” he main­tains.  “We could ex­plain to a child—when you en­gage in these ac­tiv­i­ties, you could ei­ther end up dead, in the hos­pi­tal, in jail, ex­pelled—your life will be tar­nished.  That’s ba­sic in­for­ma­tion that any­body should be able to un­der­stand, but they’re not tak­ing that.”

“So, we need to un­der­stand how our chil­dren think,” he says.  “We need to be able to have our stu­dents cap­ti­vat­ed in a pos­i­tive way in our schools so that they don’t have time to fight.”

Ac­cord­ing to the TTUTA To­ba­go rep, quick fix­es like met­al de­tec­tors and scan­ners are not the an­swer.

“We need to get to our stu­dents where they choose to be pos­i­tive, and we need to give them the av­enues where they can en­joy the pos­i­tive things.  The neg­a­tive things bring ex­cite­ment, and we are com­pet­ing against those,” he points out.  “We need to be able to cre­ate some av­enues for those stu­dents who are not do­ing so well in school to be cheered for, and have some­thing pos­i­tive hap­pen­ing at school.”