THE Community Safety and Security (CSS) Branch of the St Andrew Central Police Division is to embark on a sensitisation programme in all schools in that police division.

According to sub-officer in charge of the branch Sergeant Florene Clarke, the programme is geared at preparing students and school administrators to buy into the concept of personal and community safety.

The initiative comes on the heels of Monday’s brazen attack on a grade six female teacher by two men at the Dunrobin Primary School on Red Hills Road in St Andrew, which left the educator battered and bruised.

The police have not yet identified the two men who attacked the teacher although Clarke said progress was being made in the probe.

“We will be organising drama lectures involving university students. During that incident, (the attack on the teacher) students were there with phones. They will be told who to contact and how to make their contact,” Clarke told the Jamaica Observer.

Clarke said the initiative would also be geared at informing students and their parents or guardians what steps to take if they think a teacher had acted inappropriately.

“We will tell you what are your responsibilities if you think your human rights have been breached. It will be a general sensitisation”, she said.

She said the programme will also cover sexual violence.

In recent weeks, police have reported an increase in the incidents of sexual abuse against minors with the most recent and macabre incident involving the rape of an eight-year-old girl and her four adult relatives by two men in bushes at Irwin, St James last week.

Police have since arrested two men who were positively pointed out in identification parades on Wednesday.

“The issue of sexual abuse is very important and we will be focussing on that,” she told the Observer.

There are currently six high schools — Tarrant High, Jamaica College, Excelsior, John Mills, Melrose and Papine — where school resource officers are deployed by the St Andrew Central CSS.

Other Corporate Area high schools such as Wolmers, St Hugh’s, Kingston College, and Calabar are targeted as part of the branch’s Peace for Championships programme, which sees the police moving to prevent any violence evolving out of rivalry that may come to the fore during the ongoing Manning Cup and Boys and Girls Championships.

“We are out there for the entire school year,” Clarke said.

The CSS also pays special attention to the Half-Way-Tree Transport Centre.

“This is where most of the students from different schools interact, so even though some of the schools are not in our division we reach out just the same,” she said.