Rubbish bin thrown on teacher’s car

In the continuing saga of violence and indiscipline plaguing the nation’s secondary schools today, yet another teacher at South East Port-of-Spain Secondary School has had a bin full of garbage over-turned on her car while a meeting at the school was in progress.

Speaking with Newsday yesterday, teacher Judy Antoine said the bin was thrown from the first floor around 10.30 am. This is the second incident of this kind to occur within a week at the school. The last incident occurred on Friday, when Antoine reprimanded a batch of Form 4 students for misbehaving in the library and not following her instructions. Echoing her statement last week that management was treating the matter lightly, Antoine again reiterated that management was trying to “keep everything under cover.” She also told Newsday that two female students were in a fight last week, and that one student bit the other, but that nothing had been reported.

In the incident last Friday, Antoine was seated in her car on the school’s compound waiting for her car to warm up when the rubbish bin landed on her windscreen. A call to the Besson Street Police Station proved futile, as officers claimed they had no vehicles, and an E-999 patrol visited the school, but said Besson Street would have to handle the matter. In an unrelated matter, but continuing within the educational sphere, parents of students at the Tranquillity Government Primary School staged a protest outside the school, demanding the new school as promised by the Education Minister last year when she visited the school in March.

Matters came to a head yesterday as the irate parents staged the early morning protest, causing traffic to come to a standstill when they padlocked the school gates, refusing to allow students or teachers in. The parents complained that nothing been done since Manning’s visit last year, and they decided it was time to let the relevant persons know they were tired of waiting. The fire department was later called in by school authorities to remove the padlocks, allowing the students and teachers in to begin their normal routine, albeit a little late. In an immediate response, communications specialist at the Ministry of Education Mervyn Crichlow issued a press release advising that the reconstruction of the school was not scheduled to begin until July 2004, as originally planned.

Stating that the ministry regretted the action employed by the parents, Crichlow revealed that representatives of the ministry, Fire Services and the health department had visited the school, and that a meeting with parents had been arranged to discuss the issue. When Newsday contacted Crichlow, he confirmed that classes had resumed at Belmont Junior Secondary School, and that the garbage dumping incidents at South East PoS were being investigated. Classes at the Woodbrook Secondary School also resumed yesterday for Forms 1, 2 and 3, following a fire which occurred at the school’s Home Economics Department last week.