ONE hundred and eighty wayward teenaged boys have been enrolled in a truancy camp where they will, for a month, undergo assessment and counselling as part of an education ministry initiative to confront the growing problem with discipline in Jamaican schools.

The camp, to be held at the Baptist Conference Centre in Nutshell, Trelawny, will start on Saturday and will be followed by a similar camp for girls in late September.

According to Adinhair Jones, the acting director of the National Youth Service (NYS), who is directing the truancy camp, the boys are aged between 15 and 17 and were selected from over 300 submissions from guidance counsellors and parents. One hundred are from mostly inner-city communities in Kingston and St Andrew and 80 are from Montego Bay.

Their problems range from absenteeism and disorderly conduct to simply not performing in school.

“Some of them are considered to be aggressive, violent, defiant of authority, lacking in compliance, (and) hiding from school,” Jones said yesterday at a press conference hosted by the education minister, Burchell Whiteman. “Some of them have been expelled (from school).”

Teachers and administrators have been grappling with a deepening problem of indiscipline and violence in Jamaican schools and two years ago announced a pilot programme under which “time-out” could be called on overly aggressive students who would be taken from school and sent for specialist counselling.

However, teachers have complained that the programme has not worked well. Some principals have called, instead, for a more frontal approach to the problem, including the establishment of military-type “boot camps” where recalcitrant youngsters would face stiff discipline even as they received professional psychological and sociological help.

But Whiteman yesterday indicated that he was not in favour of that approach and stressed that the Nutshell camp would not be about ‘beating discipline’ into the boys.

Rather, each case will be individually analysed to determine the appropriate responses, before providing counselling and rehabilitation.

“Psychology and modern research suggest that there are some things that you really cannot change by simply enforcement without diagnosing the root cause of the problem,” the education minister stressed. “There has to be some commitment of will, some understanding of the basic factors.”

“This is a much more clinically responsible approach than what people describe as the boot camp, and I believe that all of us should give this a chance,” Whiteman added.

At the end of the month, Whiteman said, the boys will be reintegrated into their secondary schools and each will be assigned an adult for mentor who will help track progress.

During the school year, the boys will also attend ongoing personal development workshops, the minister said.

For the month at Nutshell, the boys will pursue a programme modelled roughly off what the NYS offers its trainees, including courses in creative arts, creative expressions, and a core curriculum which deals with behaviour and human development.

While it will not be the harsh “boot camp” system, the participants will not escape an environment of discipline. The centre will be manned by a combination of military and civilian staff, including persons trained in social psychology and behaviour misconduct, Jones said.

“What we have on the camp is a military and civilian outfit,” Jones said. “We place high emphasis on punctuality, deportment, general carriage, the way people speak to peers and personal development.”

Jones said each boy will receive individual briefings, “dealing with the behaviour misconduct that they have been experiencing and ensuring that we come out with a sense of why they are not attending school or why they are under-performing in school”.