LIFE SAVING CLOUTS

The safety officer at the centre of a video posted to social media showing him clouting (slapping the head) students at San Juan North Secondary school, yesterday said he made a split-second decision to clout two male students, in order to prevent one from inflicting serious bodily harm to the other.

In an interview yesterday, the safety officer said although he was praised by some and condemned by others for his action, he is not advocating a return to corporal punishment in the school system. He said the incident took place on the second floor of Block E at the administration building back in May. Prior to the incident, he was dealing with parents who were trying to get the school to justify why their children were suspended.

He had not planned to hit anyone. “The Ministry of Education has a policy and I am not going to advocate children be brutalised in any school or at their home. That was not my intention and it will never be.

“I heard a commotion taking place where children were banging on the railing and shouting. The entire area was crowded with students. I ran across the car park and had to push through everyone gathered on the second floor. When I reach...and seeing a student with a piece of iron and the other fighting up.

“Picture yourself as an officer, a person whose job is to protect the school population. You have to make a split-second decision on how to contain the situation while preserving your own life. What do you do? You use as minimal force as possible to try and get the situation down to a controllable level. Not using any force to damage or kill anyone, but minimal...as least as possible. That is what I had to do in order to get them under control,” the safety officer said.

The safety officer, who asked not to be identified, said had he not intervened with his clouts, the situation could have escalated rapidly to the point when the piece of iron could have come into play. The officer said he always tries to educate students on proper behaviour while they are in or out of the school or walking on the streets. After 13 years at this school, he said, he could hold his head up high because he always made the right decisions for the sake of the safety of all the children.

He said all safety officers are trained to assess situations rapidly. “If you see a situation that could get as they say, ‘ugly quick’, what you have to do is make a split-second decision. Being the person I am, I realised if the situation was not contained, someone could have been injured or even killed. And then I would have to answer to a parent or parents as to why their child was injured or possibly even something worse,” said the safety officer.

He said that since his intervention in May, both students whom he had parted, had moved up to Forms Four and Three and have since settled down in their respective classes. In his years at the school, the officer, students are in general “good”, but are faced with a lot of challenges on a daily basis both at home and in the classroom. He said this is not known or appreciated by the general public. He urged more citizens to come on board through mentoring or other means, to guide young people to the right path.

“Sometimes children choose to be violent because they are growing up in communities where they see these types of behaviour and a lot of violence. I would like to see more people come out and do better to help these children. One of the students who I clouted in order to part the fight, his parents came to school later and told me, ‘thank you, sir’, because the child no longer fights on the road or in the school anymore.”

The officer said that the Education Ministry is working hard to help these students and parents need to do their part as well. “As I said before, I am not going to advocate or brutalise anyone’s child or children, but at the end of the day, that is not what it is about. We need to have a better solution, because the violence in our schools is really out of control,” the officer said.