THE EDUCATION Ministry’s ‘rapid reaction force’ to deal with violence in schools is still in the process of investigating an attack by a parent n a teacher on Monday, begging the question of how rapid the force actually is?
Schools and the public both need to be patient was the answer from Ministry official Konstantinos Konstantinopoulos.
“The team has only just been created,” Konstantinopoulos said yesterday. “When it starts operating fully, reactions will definitely be more rapid.”
He added that the force was not just about immediate intervention but timely intervention, which is why it is holding meetings to see which schools need to be addressed as a priority.
“It can’t solve problems by itself, though,” Konstantinopoulos said. “It needs the schools’ input too. The team is comprised of experts – child psychologists, experts on teenage delinquency issues and social workers, among others – whose job is to support and advise schools on how to deal with the problems they are facing.”
The team plans to start with the schools that most recently experienced problems and help them understand how to deal with these issues.
Asked what was being done about the most recent incident in a Larnaca school when a boy’s father stormed into a classroom and beat a teacher up for telling his son off and excluding him from the school’s football team, Konstantinopoulos said the issue was currently being discussed at the Ministry and the Minister himself was taking action.
“But certain things can’t be made public, as sometimes they make the situation worse. There are a lot of exaggerations,” he said.
In a recent announcement, the Education Ministry strongly condemned violent outbursts against teachers, who today are expected to meet and decide what measures they will take to protest the situation.
Minister Andreas Demetriou has set teenage delinquency as a top priority and plans to implement a number of measures by the end of this year.
These include, among others, the creation of a the rapid reaction force, the creation of an observatory body that will record and analyse all violent phenomena, the promotion of seminars to train teachers on how to deal with outbursts and the reinforcement of the ministry’s Educational Psychology Service.
