It’s time for Minister of Education Anthony Garcia to take meaningful steps to intervene in schools in hotspot and high risk areas, and to seriously consider triage solutions that would improve the lives of students who attend them.
In January, two students of Success/Laventille Secondary School were dragged from a taxi and shot dead. Another student was murdered outside the school’s gate in November 2014. Two schoolboys were also killed in St Augustine last month in what appeared to be a reprisal for the torching of a vehicle.
The fate of 24 students at Chaguanas North Secondary School is still being discussed. The students, several of whom have criminal records, are facing suspensions in the wake of an alleged plan to stage a gun assault at the school by gang members in the community. The Education Minister claimed that they instilled fear in the school and TTUTA president Devanand Sinanan suggested that they were might be “ringleaders” and “troublemakers.”
If the school system is not maintained as a haven from gang influence regardless of geography, then it stands no chance of developing a generation of young children who will view participating in civil society as a valid option to the ready temptations of “thug life”. At a symposium titled Women Managing Education In Vulnerable Communities at UWI last week, principal of the Barataria South Secondary School, Sharlene Hicks-Raeburn, acknowledged that “gang elements” had crept into school halls and educators needed to learn how to manage these new impediments to learning.
Quite apart from children attending school being gunned down in the street as a part of gang reprisals, it’s alleged that one student held in an altercation with police last week was also wanted on serious charges. So far the conversation has circled the Education Ministry’s powers to suspend, but that should be clarified and articulated as an absolute last ditch option in the process of shaping young minds for the future.
In environments in which children face danger in order to get to school and overwhelmed parents send children to school more for their safety than their education, there is need for fresh approaches that are more engaged with current realities.
Principals who don’t lose their children to violence are just as likely to lose them to the lure of the “curriculum of the street”, a much shorter course with more readily evident rewards. There needs to be greater focus on understanding the challenges facing children in the education system. We need to be able to provide to those who are in danger of becoming diverted towards criminality, guidance counselling and mentorship opportunities that blunt the appeal of criminal gangs.
One pillar of a diversified economy is the presence of a strong profile of well-educated students, the knowledge based resource on which modern efforts at competing in global markets is built. To do that, the Ministry of Education must ensure that its schools are capable of developing well-prepared students in all the environments in which they operate. Assuming social homogeneity in T&T is being proven absurd by the challenges these schools are facing.
Until Mr Garcia acknowledges the grim reality and serious demands of that situation as well as the pressing need to act on it, schools struggling to compete for the future of the children they are supposed to educate will continue to do so at a severe disadvantage.