10 percent Form One students deemed ‘high risk’

In a report by Professor Ramesh Deosaran entitled Towards a Healthy School Model, out of 28 secondary schools randomly selected, five were determined to be “high risk” and out of a total of  3,525 Form One students (male and female), ten percent were found to be “high risk.”

The report was compiled by members of the UWI’s Criminology Department Joel Joseph, Vidya Lall, Ian Ramdhanie and Deosaran. He said schools should avoid the habit of quick-fix responses or relish overnight solutions to long-standing problems of schools violence and delinquency. Having used a scientific approach in analysing the data, he felt that this would establish a reliable basis for reducing delinquent behaviour and create a better climate for academic and civil behaviour in schools. “We believe that school violence and delinquency can be significantly reduced within a stipulated period if the problem is clearly identified, properly diagnosed, measured and subjected to appropriate interventions,” Deosaran said.

He said, by using this method, the Centre has set a pathway to “benchmarking, feedback, and collective action” for delinquency reduction in a continuously improving mode. He warned that even those schools which think that they are now immune from student violence and delinquency should know that this may only be a matter of time. He said the report should help the Ministry of Education develop strategies to restore peace and civility, prevent a deterioration of the situation and eventually put the responsibility largely upon the students themselves. “The short-cuts, the plaster-type responses and the purely punitive, legalistic approaches just cannot do anymore,” he stated.