There has been a significant decrease in school violence that has been attributed to school policing initiatives. There were 77 incidents reported last year, down from 142 in 2022.
Assistant Commissioner of Police in charge of school policing, Dr. Chaswell Hanna, spoke with reporters on Monday on the focus of his team in the upcoming academic year. He said, “one of them being parents who have been coming on campuses and creating disturbances with school administrators and teachers. We want to let parents know, right off the bat, we’re not going to tolerate that. We placed a number of parents before the courts last academic year. We’re also going to be looking out for students who for some reason find themselves in barbershops during school hours. We want to let barbershop owners know, and operators know, that we are going to be looking for that.”
According to the Assistant Commissioner an awareness campaign will be launched to warn students, parents and teachers about drug infused edibles. He said, “we gonna share a number of public services announcements that the Royal Bahamas Police Force has produced in conjunction with the Ministry of Education. We want students to be careful of the packaging. The packaging looks similar to popular brands that children would normally purchase so we want to beware of that.”
School resource officers have been deployed to all junior and senior high public schools in the country. Hanna said, “those officers are supported with a team of security officers, crossing guards and each teacher is a member of that safety team.”
The new academic year begins on August 31st.
