TRYING to find a solution for the mounting displays of anti-social behaviour among students at Allman Town Primary School in Kingston, the administrators there recently hosted a creative school bag initiative during which no students were taken to the principal’s office for committing infractions as they were all busy putting their creativity to the test.

La-Toya Nesbitt, principal of the school, told the Jamaica Observer that more than 300 children, and their parents, immersed themselves into designing school bags which they entered into a competition last week. According to Nesbitt, that level of participation indicated to her that programmes are urgently needed to get the students and parents working together for the benefit of the children.

Nesbitt said it is important to have a support system for parents, who struggle to deal with the increase in anti-social behaviour by some children while they were away from face-to-face classes for roughly two years because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

“We find that the children are very exposed. For grade six, they have a lot of ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ packed in their heads. They would have been exposed to a lot of things on the Internet and have been displaying some of them. They want to touch each other, and instead of going home they want to stay back and congregate. In one scenario a girl was waiting on a guy at the bus stop, things we wouldn’t normally see. The other thing we are seeing is children being a little bit aggressive. For every little thing, they fight,” said Nesbitt.

But during the bag competition, dubbed Anything but your bag, Nesbitt made a key observation.

“On the day, we didn’t have anybody coming to my office; there was just so much excitement, there was so much participation and creativity. We have not yet selected a winner. When we return from the Easter break, the winners will be announced.

“We need to think outside the box in order to start the resocialisation process. When we call in the parents, some will share that they are having the same challenge at home. We need to find a way to bridge that gap. We need to find out how we can reach the parents to help them deal with what they are experiencing. We need programmes that will have children working together with parents on something they enjoy doing together,” highlighted Nesbitt.

She said a good sign was that the children were learning because they applied what was taught to them when designing their bags.

“We realised that learning is actually taking place because they used what they learned [in oorder] to do what they needed to do. The competition gave them a sense of pride and excitement that they would not have had since coming back to school,” declared Nesbitt.