THE security and safety of students at the Brimmer Vale High School at Baileys Vale near Port Maria, St Mary, is among the chief concerns for principal Evorine Henry-Tracey.

“We try our best to keep our students safe and secure and all of our workers too. It is really a challenge though, because we do not have a full perimeter wall and so there are breaches, and from time to time we will have intruders and sometimes we have major concerns,” Henry Tracey told the Jamaica Observer.

“Just weeks ago, for example, one of my students was kidnapped by two outsiders. He could have been harmed, luckily they just took his phone. So these are some of the things that we do grapple with — it’s really a major issue,” she stated.

“My personal feeling about schools is that we really shouldn’t have any walls around them because [I believe] a school really belongs to the community and so everybody in the community should seek to protect every child, school worker, school property, everything like that; but we know the real world in which we live and so it is imperative that we try to secure the campus so that our students and our workers are not harmed,” she continued.

But to fence the property is too exorbitant an expense for the school to undertake. Henry-Tracey stated that she is hoping therefore to improve relations between the school and the community.

“The school is, however, set in a community with its own culture, with its own perception and sometimes the relationship between the school and the community is really not as good as we would have liked and it is one of the areas we are now working on. We have scheduled a town hall meeting to see how many community members we could get in to see what we are doing and to be a part of the school,” Henry Tracey told the Sunday Observer.

The gathering, which should have been hosted on local government election day, has been postponed for sometime before year end.

Though some community members have begun their support of the school, Henry Tracey sees room for improvement.

“Some members have come on board. LP Martin [Funeral Home] for example, which is just across the road … they probably have been our strongest supporters, but there are some other little things what we need to work through as it relates to young persons in the community coming onto the compound, for example in the evenings. and we want them to perceive the school in such a way that even when they come they will protect everything that is here. I don’t think we have reached that stage yet and so we struggle with that,” said the educator.

She disclosed that the school has had instances of theft.

“We have had issues with theft, many of them we have not been able to solve and so I will not say it is from the community because sometimes these things place within us from inside,” she said.