MINISTER OF EDUCATION Ronald Jones has warned principals not to send home students during school hours.
“I don’t want to see students being shut out of the school by anybody,” Jones declared yesterday in an address to the morning assembly of Lester Vaughan School.
“I don’t want to see students being sent home during the course of the school day because when we do, we create a liability and the state has to pay.”
Jones said when principals were dealing with disobedient students who refused to observe the school rules, giving them or sending parents, a note and the order to leave school was not the appropriate way to deal with such matters.
“You keep them in school until three o’clock. Parents are working and when you send 100 or 84 or 200 students out on the streets, where are they going to go?
They become open to all of the wiles and trickeries of those who don’t care about their growth or development.”
Jones said the school must be an oasis for children, many of whom were brutalized within their communities.
“If a school can’t create that environment, then where are we going to find it?” he asked.
“That is my view and I will ask others to also buy into that view.
“Some children will give trouble, I know, but we must draw them even closer. If we push them further apart [from us], what is going to happen is that the spiteful boy, the angry man, the vexed woman, would hit out at society in some way.”
