Security to be improved at Welches Primary School

Welches Primary School could soon have a security guard stationed on the premises.

President of the Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT) Rudy Lovell made the disclosure on Thursday, a day after a naked man was seen masturbating opposite the St Thomas compound. 

He told Barbados TODAY that following a visit to the school on Thursday morning, he spoke with Chief Education Officer Dr Ramona Bradshaw-Archer who said she had written to the authority in charge of security guards and efforts were being made to have one assigned to Welches Primary.

The development has been welcomed by parents, some of whom raised alarm after the incident on Wednesday and called for a guard to be stationed in the hut at the school entrance. 

Owen Stuart, one of the parents who had chased the offender, returned to the area with six colleagues from the National Conservation Commission (NCC) and cleared a large area of overgrown foliage which the culprit had allegedly escaped through.

While Stuart acknowledged that debushing the area would make some people feel safer and less anxious, he insisted a security officer was still needed on the school compound.

“It is a serious thing. There [is] a booth there and no security. The booth there for a reason and now something happened it shows that there needs security,” he pointed out.

Lovell, meanwhile, said the BUT would continue to communicate with the Ministry of Education regarding the absence of security guards at primary schools across the island.

He said it was a major concern given the rise in violence in communities across the country as well as violence among some school children.

Dismissing the notion that some schools like Welches Primary were low risk, the union leader insisted that every school in Barbados should have adequate security and fencing “so as to prevent any intruders or acts of violence that can be halted by the presence of security”.

“No school is a low-risk school in my opinion. In the opinion of the union, . . . all schools have students, all schools have parents, all schools are community schools and at any time anything can happen that can put the lives of those occupants on the school compound at risk. So, all schools should be secured,” Lovell insisted. 

(KC)