Teachers’ duty to care for students at school

THE EDITOR: Recently there was a proposal by the Minister of Education to reduce the hour lunch break in primary and secondary schools to 30 minutes in an effort to cut down on school violence. This was not agreed to by TUTTA.

Even shortening the lunch hour without ensuring consistent teacher supervision in the unstructured times is shortchanging the children in their care.

All children, especially those who come from homes where any kind of stress, dysfunction or violence is present, need a reassuring adult around to make them feel safe. Only then will some kind of playground socialising and classroom learning take place.

Presently, there is much discussion on whether teachers are required to supervise students during their lunch breaks and before and after school. TTUTA states that safety officers, MTS security, deans, principals and vice principals walking the classrooms should ensure that school violence does not happen.

What level of training in child development do MTS security and safety officers have that they can safely intervene in schoolyard misbehaviour or potential violence between 12 to 17-year-old girls and boys, or younger children in primary schools?

With consistent playground supervision by teachers, children with behavioural problems who may show tendencies to become bullies would have responsible adults monitoring them during unstructured times like lunch or break times, therefore cutting down on potential incidents, protecting them and possible victims.

They are children. They are going to push the boundaries, climb fences, knock over other children, experiment with curse words and other pranks or worse.

Teachers on rostered daily playground duty would get to know and recognise certain behaviours in some children and so be able to alert the principal and classroom teachers, thereby helping to offset certain violent incidents and seek help for these children before things escalate.

It doesn’t mean that every teacher works through every lunch hour. Each teacher would do lunch or break time duty maybe once a week.

Being a teacher means caring for students while they are at school. A teacher cannot be off duty at lunchtime. Whose responsibility are the students then?

Children will be children wherever they are and need the adults in their environment (in this case the school) to help and guide their socialising skills, offering a hand to the shy, weaker children, calming the over exuberant, offsetting potentially dangerous actions, encouraging and affirming caring respectful behaviour and friendships, recognising and rewarding heroes and budding leaders before they turn into bullies or playground gang leaders.

Why wait until we need security guards and police to keep schoolchildren in check? Why wait until the children in our care develop unacceptable behaviour patterns then say we have a school violence problem?

Our children deserve better from the responsible adults in their world:

* Parents to choose a safe, learning-focused school to leave them at every day, and stay involved in their school lives.
*Teachers to respect and welcome them into such a place, and fill them with the desire to learn.
* Leaders to make it happen.

SUZETTE CADIZ, retired teacher