Troupe: Students should not be suspended to go home unattended
Published:Thursday | November 17, 2022 | 1:26 PMSashana Small/ Staff Reporter
The Ministry of Education should review its expulsion and suspension policy to limit the risk of sanctioned students being vulnerable to gang recruitment, acting Director of Safety and Security in Schools Richard Troupe has said.
Troupe expressed alarm at recent data disclosed by Commissioner of Police Major Antony Anderson that more than 875 children have been implicated in major crimes over the last four years.
“There is some uncomfortable truth and we need to find out how many of these children would have been suspended or expelled,” Troupe said while responding to panellists at an Anti-Gang Week town hall meeting on Wednesday.
Troupe said the ministry would now need to collect data to determine the rate of suspensions and expulsions and identify the schools where these penalties are carried more frequently.
Just recently, several female students of Meadowbrook High were suspended following a brawl at the St Andrew-based school.
The review, he said, would also take into consideration schools’ intervention programmes.
“Suspensions and expulsions must be the last resort; it cannot be the first response by a school,” Troupe contended.
And instead of removing students from schools and sending them home to be indolent, he argued that they should be directed to restorative justice centres and integrated into structured programmes.
“The other thing that we need with suspension is we must suspend the child into something. The child should not just be made to go home and be left unattended. Perhaps there is a need for us to consider where if a child is suspended, he is suspended into a programme,” the director of safety and security said.
Troupe further stated that the ministry should be directly involved in reassigning expelled students to other schools.
“I think as a school community, as a Ministry of Education, there’s also a role for us to play to ensure that if a child is separated justifiably from his or her school, that that child’s education is considered for another institution and we provide support to that child’s family during that transition,” he said.
Social anthropology lecturer at The University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, Dr Herbert Gayle, who was also a panellist at the town hall, pointed to data from London showing that 80 per cent of suspended or expelled students got into conflicts as a consequence. He said London reviewed its expulsion policy 20 years ago.
Gayle shared that similar data exist for Jamaica.
The researcher said only six per cent of schools in Jamaica offer restorative punishment where a child recognises he is being punished but it is done within an environment to encourage them to become a better person. He maintained that this should be the norm.
“If you come into the school and you carry on anything at all that is violent, we’re not going to send you home and all of these old-fashioned punitive things. We’re going to sit you down, get you to the guidance counsellors, work with you, find out what happened, work with your families, and so forth,” Troupe said.
“If a kid is coming from violence and you approach him with violence, it’s just not going to help.”