Schools are ticking time bombs – board chairman

The spate of schoolyard brawls since the full resumption of classes this year is evidence of heightened human-resource challenges facing Jamaican administrators who might be sitting on a public-health time bomb if the crisis is not averted.

That's the view of Dr Hilary Robertson-Hickling, chairman of Meadowbrook High School, where chaotic scenes were captured last week on video of a mass fight among students. The chairman confirmed that the row was sparked by schoolgirls fighting over a boy.

Robertson-Hickling said the Meadowbrook incident is a reflection of a wider frustration among schoolchildren whose socialisation skills have been severely impacted by two years of semi-isolation at home during the coronavirus pandemic.

“One of the important things that COVID did was that there were not sufficient channels for grieving, and a lot of young people in the world feared becoming orphans because they lost somebody who had died during COVID,” Robertson-Hickling, a human resource and behavioural science expert, said in a Gleaner interview Friday.

“So we have a lot of psychological issues that we have to address because there is a lot of stress and pressure, including economic stress.”

Robertson-Hickling warned that the emerging youth violence was of epidemic proportions and needed to be addressed holistically.

The board chairman said that the upper St Andrew school has fulfilled its obligations of keeping the Ministry of Education fully informed. But she said that Jamaican society has “a bigger problem” which is unresolved.

“I knew when the pandemic came it would have dire psychological consequences. This is happening all over the world, but I do not believe that at any level we have been preparing for the post-pandemic situation,” said Robertson-Hickling.

Social media have been swamped with videos of school fights this year, including some with deadly ends.

William Knibb Memorial High student Khamal Hall was fatally stabbed by a schoolmate in March. And 16-year-old Michion Campbell was fatally stabbed by a 17-year-old during a fight at Kingston Technical High in September.

Both matters are in court.

Senator Damion Crawford, opposition spokesman on education and training, is scheduled to host a press conference on school violence Monday morning at the Office of the Leader of the Opposition.

Robertson-Hickling believes that the Kingston Technical incident should have been a wake-up call for Jamaica. She is concerned about the incidence of schoolchildren arming themselves with scissors and other weapons that can easily be carried on their person or in their bags.

“So here we have all of these challenges, but instead of us coming together as a country and admitting that there are problems, they are not being recognised and, therefore, are not being addressed,” the academic said.

“So we are going to have young people with serious mental-health challenges. If we do not admit that we are having a serious national problem, we are going to keep missing the boat. You can't have a kind of piecemeal approach because the children in school are themselves very worried, they are anxious.”

Robertson-Hickling insists that schools are a microcosm of wider aggression and violence in Jamaican society.

The board chairman said that many troubled and underperforming students hail from homes and communities where domestic violence and gang feuds are an everyday reality.

Administrators, she said, are unfairly “expected to conduct miracles”.

“Children are coming from homes and communities which are at war and the school has to be finding outlets for their aggression, calming them down and so on. We also have to balance what's going on positively because otherwise we give the impression that we have a generation of vipers, which they are not,” Robertson-Hickling said.

“They are our children and we are not really rearing them too well, because once some of them get into trouble, we throw them away.”

christopher.serju@gleanerjm.com