By Claudia Gardner, Freelance WriterWESTERN BUREAU:
THERE WAS disorder yesterday at Knockalva Technical High School, Ramble, Hanover, the second day of clashes between the school's principal, Lephraim Morgan, and vendors who sell outside the gates. Yesterday, Mr. Morgan was physically assaulted by a vendor who had trespassed onto the school compound.
The vendors, however, charged that Mr. Morgan had led his students in an attack on them.
According to Mr. Morgan, a man entered the compound on Wednesday "with an agenda to create trouble. He brought his cronies with a video camera," the principal said. "The man came with a box with food to sell on the premises. I asked them to leave and then tried to bar them from coming in, with my stick. They started to film me and hit off my glasses off my face, destroying them, and pushed me to the ground."
Mr. Morgan said that, however, some students rushed to his assistance and "taught the intruders a lesson!" At the heart of the problem, he said, was that vendors wanted to enter the compound at lunch-time to sell. He said he had banned vendors from the school compound because there were reports of some of them peddling ganja to the students and that some had even been seen selling rum to the children.
The school's administration allowed students to give support to the vendors at the gate in the morning and evening, but insisted that during the lunch break, they must patronise the school canteen. he said."We run a canteen which we use at the centre of the school in terms of welfare programmes, seeing to the needs of our students, and, we are not apologising to anybody. We are not going to surrender this to anybody," he insisted.
The vendors had a different version. "A couple vendors were on the school compound and the principal told him to leave and after an argument started, the principal boxed him," Joel Little said.
He said Garfield 'Nanny' MacKenzie was set upon by students who beat him resulting in injuries to the face.
According to Little, after the students were finished beating 'Nanny', they then stormed the vendors' stalls, where they threw away the food, turned over the drinks, smashed stalls and set one of the vendor's shops on fire. He claimed that during the melee more than $60,000 which was in the shop, disappeared.
It was claimed also that 65-year-old Madelyn Ricketts was hit in the face with a rock, which broke her dentures.
A vendor, who gave her name as Maureen, said she saw children hurling stones at a male vendor, smash a camera, took out the film and threw it away.
Amid reports that vendors had massed outside the school gates threatening to beat students yesterday, the principal walked to the gate with some of the students in tow.
A few minutes later, students scattered and screamed as two schoolboys were seen sprinting up the hill towards the school building with two men, armed with pieces of board, charging after them.
Running close behind was a corporal from the Ramble police station, shouting at them to stop while several constables tried to quell the disturbance.
The corporal returned several minutes later with an iron pipe, a rusty machete and a make-shift cricket bat which he had confiscated.
"My students stood up for me yesterday. I am very proud of them. Even boys whom I had earlier punished came to my rescue," Mr. Morgan later told The Gleaner.
