Berbice High School fiasco unbecoming of standards of education

Feb 24, 2009 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The recent shenanigans that are being played out at the Berbice High School in New Amsterdam are most unfortunate to the students, their parents, the teachers, and the education officials in Region Six.
Certainly the situation should not have reached such a dire stage it reached as of Friday last. Students taking matters into their own hands, locking out the teachers and behaving in such a manner as I saw on TV newscasts were most unfortunate and unbecoming of our standards of education in Guyana.
The unwholesome writings on some of the placards were also of poor taste, as many of them attacked Madame Regional Education Officer Miss Shafiran Bhajan and other stakeholders in the fragile situation.
Once again, corporal punishment (CP) has raised its head as it is the central theme in this controversy. The situation was first made public a few Thursdays ago on a call-in TV programme through which no other than Madam Regional Education Officer Ms Bhajan was the guest. She heard the complaint made by no other than a parent, I presume — and an angry one at that — of the incident, whereby the teacher in question dealt the lashes to the entire class due to them not doing her assignment.
I have not administered CP on a student in nearly two years. With that being said, it must not be interpreted that I depended on CP for disciplinary measures in the past.  I did not.  I have no authority to do so, unless I am instructed to do such by my superior(s). And I would most certainly never hit a student because they did not do an assignment. That contravenes the policy by the Ministry of Education in the document titled ‘Manual for the Maintenance of Order and Discipline in Schools’.
Though I am a strong advocate for CP, I am totally against it being used as a tool of punishment for failing to do homework or assignment. Lashing females on their buttocks is totally out of the question, because the said manual stipulates that females must only be whipped on their hands — nowhere else! It is worrying that those who first reported this incident on a Live TV programme seem to have taken a full 360-degree turn in how they viewed the incident, and are now dead-set on disrupting the curriculum and lashing out at the Honourable Minister of Education and the Education Officers in New Amsterdam. Ironically, this is a learning situation for these students. They are learning a very wrong lesson here as the examples being set for them by other ‘forces’ are not in their best interests, but are meant to buttress their own frustrations towards the government and the education officials. This should not be! Children should not be used as pawns.
We may not know this but the Parent-Teachers’ Association of any school has extensive powers which I believe the Ministry of Education needs to revisit and reorder.
The PTA can do so much as to shut down the operations of a school if they feel so. This organisation, though very inactive in many schools, has a wealth of privileges and powers at its hands, but here at the Berbice High School we are seeing those powers being used for all the wrong reasons. It has been agreed at all forums that this situation should have been amicably settled and solved by the school’s administration with collaboration from the Department of Education Region Six. At a time when only chaos seems to be the order of the day, the students, who are acting way out of line, need to allow groups such as the prefect body to liaison with the administrators of the school and the region’s education department to arrive at decisions and solutions. No doubt, poor communication played a major factor in where the situation at that school stands presently.
Yes, we teachers work under some extremely ‘stretched’ conditions, I know. However, we need to be ever astute when performing our duties. If we intend on keeping CP in schools and in our laws, then we ought to comply with procedures which surrounds its much debated and criticised use within our public school system. On many occasions, parents would come in school or at PTA meetings and beg us to “beat” their children if they go out of line or are recalcitrant, but as teachers we know it is not our duty to.
The manual does state that when all else has failed then and only then can CP be an option. This situation just adds more fuel to the already raging fire started by those who are dead set against using CP on children in school.
They must be gathering their arguments and waiting to pounce on those responsible.
I hope that, after a thorough, fair and balanced investigation, the teacher can return to the classroom to continue her instructional pursuits which would, at the end of the day, benefit the students there.
In the meantime, the students need to step away a little from the fore and give the authorities a chance to perform as they are mandated to, especially in these circumstances.
Those who may be guilty of instigating certain actions from the students need to ponder on the bigger picture. End of term is fast approaching; every second of instructional time is valuable, thus, there is no time to waste.
The parents need to back off as their involvement along with their children’s is only frustrating the entire process, which would be unbeneficial to all stakeholders.
All parties, too, need to accept the pending decisions by the authoritative body that deals with matters pertaining to employment, discipline and dismissal of teachers — the Teaching Service Commission (TSC).
This situation must be handled better by parents and students of this school. We expect higher standards of behaviour from those who bear the name of this elite institution which has been around for nearly a century, and one which has earned the second place in terms of secondary school seniority in Regions Five and Six.
Leon Jameson Suseran

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