IT IS an absolute shame that teachers should have to resort to shutting down schools to register their frustration with crime and violence plaguing them over a prolonged period.Nobody, neither students, teachers nor janitors, should have to be dodging bullets or planning escape routes on a regular basis to get to and from their places of education or employment. Yet, that is what the teachers and students at the Charlie Smith and Trench Town high schools have had to be dealing with over several months of community gang feuds. Their experience is not peculiar. On the other side of town in East Kingston, a similar fate afflicts students and teachers at several schools.
There really is no good reason to expect that marauding gunmen will show any more respect for school compounds than they do the private homes of residents. The brutality that drives them is beyond reason. So when Member of Parliament for South St. Andrew, Dr. Omar Davies, disagrees with the planned shutdown of the schools as a form of protest tomorrow and Tuesday, he may have a point. That is, if the protest is targeted at the gunmen.
But what the administrators are asking for is for the state, through the security forces, to provide them with protection.
When Dr. Davies argues that only the children will be harmed by the protest, he is either being disingenuous or obtuse. Are the children able to give their full attention to school work while gunmen parade outside the gates of the school? Can teachers give of their best, having entered the area with much trepidation and then having to spend the next few hours worrying about what may happen while they are in the classroom, and then again about their safety when they are ready to leave?
It is the duty of the state to protect its citizens and its most vulnerable.
Teachers are putting their lives at tremendous risk when they seek day after day to enter these strife-torn communities to teach. Residents in the areas have a duty to themselves and to their children to share whatever information they have with the police regarding criminality, but even where they fail to do this, the security forces are not expected to leave them to the mercy of the gunmen. The situation in South St. Andrew is crying out for leadership. Our children deserve better.
The protest will hardly change the gunmen into compassionate human beings who will thereafter skirt the school compounds. What the school community is demanding is for the state to provide them with security so that they will be able to function with some degree of normality. That is not asking for too much.
