Cuban Ambassador Gisela Garcia Rivera and Education Minister Andrew Holness shake hands before signing a three-year bilateral agreement to recruit educators at the Office of the Prime Minister, Monday. Looking on is Dr Angel Bravo Rodriguez, representative of Dr Ena Elsa Velazquez, the Cuban education minister. - Junior Dowie/Staff Photographer

Installing metal detectors will not be the panacea to solve the safety and security challenges that plague Jamaica's public schools, Minister of Education Andrew Holness has warned.

Holness told The Gleaner Monday that a "culture change" was pivotal to any national campaign to rein in violence.

The minister was speaking against the background of a spate of bloody attacks in secondary schools, including two stabbings last week.

"Metal detectors don't make you more secure, what makes you more secure is the strategic and regular use of the detectors," he said shortly after signing a three-year bilateral agreement between the Cuban and Jamaican governments at the Office of the Prime Minister in St andrew Monday morning.

Tattered image

Later that day, reports surfaced of yet another high school stabbing incident involving a seventeen-year-old David Hall, of Penwood High School, was stabbed by schoolmate while he was walking along a school corridor.

Penwood, which has been making some progress in trying to mend a tattered image as a problem school, is located in Holness' West Central St Andrew constituency.

Hall has been hospitalised and a search was launched Monday for the suspect.

Holness asked school managers to enlist broad-based support among their academic staff in using the technology to make institutions safer.

Sensitisation programme

"If they (school administrators) don't have the culture to use the metal detectors, they will put them at the bottom of a drawer," he said. "Many agents - principals, teachers, administrators - don't see security as an important function of their role in education."

To help change this mindset, Holness noted that the ministry was currently carrying out a sensitisation programme to urge school administrators to be more active on the security front.

Placing metal detectors in schools was among a raft of measures announced by Holness earlier this year to curb the growing problem of violence in public schools.

The bilateral agreement, which becomes effective in 2009, will allow the Jamaican Government to recruit Cuban educators to teach in secondary schools nationwide.