THE Jamaica Association of Principals, while welcoming the education ministry’s new security and safety policy guidelines for schools, say they’re concerned about whether the various support agencies will live up to their side of the bargain.

The document, which has been distributed to principals of secondary and tertiary institutions, sets out basic standards which all schools should adopt with urgency. But there is apprehension, president of the association, Nadine Malloy, told the Observer.

“Where we do have a problem is the supporting agencies like the social services. So for example, when a student is to be searched and the student refuses to be searched, will the police come on time or at all?

“When you have children who need referral for counselling and behavioural management, is that service going to be available on time?” she queried. “Many schools have students who smoke ganja and when they do they become uncontrollable. The students who are smoking ganja and handling drugs and who are aligned to gangs, my colleagues and I are not equipped or prepared to take them on. Will the time-out centres be there to help us?” she added.

She said there were other concerns – such as the stashing of weapons on school premises by persons accessing the facilities outside of school hours – and it was hoped that the implementation of the guidelines would help address them.

“Weapons can and are being placed on the premises outside of school time by outsiders or students themselves living in various communities. For example, I will have a metal detector at the gate and I will search the students but the weapon was hidden from Saturday afternoon, so that is a major concern for most of us,” Malloy said.

She said while there have been discussions about introducing safe school zones, the association feels it can be taken a step further.

“We feel a safe school zone should also mean a total lock down of the premises once the students are not there, or in instances where the premises are to be used there needs to be control of entry and exit that every single person who comes in is searched,” she said noting that this would extend to vendors in the vicinity of the school.

According to Malloy, metal detector searches while good, would not break the back of the problem.

“I have known of instances where when fights broke out the students didn’t reach for weapons in their bags or on their bodies, they went to various places to retrieve the weapons, they hid them on the grounds,” she said.

“We want urgency in the implementation of all that is outlined in the document; the beefing up the services and the opening of necessary centres with the personnel in place,” she urged.

In the meantime, Children’s Advocate Mary Clarke, said she is prepared to continue to offer assistance to the school system noting that many of its cases have had to with schools.

“Every day we are called in. Many of our cases have to do with schools and we are not going to change that. What I am happy about in the policy is that an effort is going to be made to deal with children with behavioural and emotional and learning problems instead of putting them out of the schools,” she told the Observer.

And John Mclean, assistant commissioner of police in charge of community safety under whose portfolio the Safe Schools Programme falls, said the police were prepared to work with the ministry and individual schools to help improve their security. Classifying the document as wide-ranging, he said the recommendations were practical and expressed satisfaction that teachers have been mandated to report crimes.

“It is well structured, it states the things that must be done. For example, the teachers must report crimes, it can’t be covered up, they have to report it to the authorities. The recommendations are practical and should help to make schools safer places,” he said.

Chief education officer in the ministry, Jasper Lawrence, said while the policy has among other things, built in protection for teachers, students and all persons occupying school spaces, and places emphasis on the proper identification of persons who gain entry to classrooms, it went further than violence prevention to address other safety issues.