It’s lunch time at the Craighead Primary School in North East Manchester, and boys and girls run about the playfieldaimlessly frolicking with friends.

For them it’s nothing but bliss; but for administrators, it’s a time to watch the students like hawks, ensuring they stay within the parameters of the ‘safe zones’.

“Down there, as you see, is a gully,” Principal Paulette Foote said as she pointed to the end of the playfield. As she spoke, boys played within the parameter, sometimes even rolling on the ground.

The concerned principal has expressed a need for perimeter fencing and highlighted some of the school’s impending dangers.

“We have erected signs to keep them away from the danger zones…[but] it’s not really enough. One of the main ones though is to keep the children from off the street when they are at school because, you know, we are responsible for them from 8:30 am to 3:00 pm, and so to prevent them from going up the road, if we could even get a gate to be erected that would be so good,” she told the

Jamaica Observer.

“And the children play along this area (the end of the playfield), but it is dangerous down there. And it is one of the observations of one of the National Educational Inspectorate’s report that we sort of fence the place to keep the children away from the danger zone,” Foote continued.

The principal, who noted the presence of vendors at the school’s gate, pointed out that the gate is necessary to ensure that “the children eat healthy”.

“If they are kept on the compound we’ll be able to ensure that they eat healthy from the school canteen.”

But funding has been a drawback. The principal told the Sunday Observer that though they had been trying to raise money for the fencing, not enough has been enough.

“We are trying to do something on our own. So the last term we had a little fund-raising fun day and we raised a little money, not much, but we want to start the front to just put up a gate to keep the children inside,” Foote said.

“It costs $2.2 million to complete the fence. So if we could get some entity to partner with us, that would be excellent, or one to sponsor this project,” Foote appealed.

She said that the school has approached some entities but nothing has materialised.

“We have tried with the past students association. We applied to CHASE; they said that they only fund basic schools so our school would be out of it. That was the latest one. We contacted the Ministry of Education years ago and they told us that they do volatile schools so our school would not be in that category,” she stated with disappointment.

She said that the school’s leadership has asked parents to assist, but there has been no response to date.

Outside of a need to protect the students, Foote noted that the school is sometimes preyed upon by thieves.

“We have plantain there in our little garden and banana, and the other day we planted the cabbage and things like that and a donkey was tied there and he ate some of the cabbage.We also suffer from praedial larceny with our garden. The garden supports the canteen, that’s why we were so sad the other day when the donkey destroyed the cabbage because it was to support the canteen,” she told theSunday Observer.