Wilkie Cumberbatch burglary prompts security call

An apparent burglary at the Wilkie Cumberbatch Primary School in The Pine led to the school’s early closure on Monday and prompted the Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT) to call for increased security at schools in “high-risk” areas across the island.

In a statement, the Ministry of Education said it was notified about a break-in of the staff room and prefab classroom buildings. Police responded to the incident and discovered that two laptops and cleaning supplies were missing. The laptops have since been recovered.

“Under circumstances such as these, it is not the practice of the ministry to close the school, but rather, relocate the classes until the completion of the investigation,” the ministry said. “However, parents who turned up at the schools insisted on taking their children out of school, thereby resulting in no classes being held today. The rooms that were affected have since been sanitised, and regular classes are expected to resume tomorrow, Tuesday.” 

When Barbados TODAY visited the school, scores of students were seen being supervised under the shade of trees on the playing field. Parents and guardians were seen signing out their children and leaving the school.

Parents reported receiving a WhatsApp message informing them of the incident and police investigation and urging parents to collect their children.

Parents and guardians collecting their wards.

Union shop steward Pedro Shepherd, the school’s information technology teacher, said this was not the first school invasion and there was a need for tighter security measures there and at several other locations which he described as high-risk, densely populated areas.

“This school is in the high-risk area and I think we need to have a lot more vigilance in this area,” he said. “Westbury is another school in a high-risk zone as well as Wesley Hall [Junior and Infants schools]. They are densely populated areas,” he said.

“Security is an issue [here] and as you walk around you see breaches in the fence, so even if a fellow doesn’t want to walk through the gate he can simply walk through the [broken-down fence] and come inside. This is something that has been happening at the school for a little while and I think that we may have to look at some security system in this school.”

Shepherd added: “Over the last few months, we have been experiencing someone entering the school and scattering garbage [around the place]. We have a watchman here but this watchman is here from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. during the course of the week and there is no watchman on Thursdays. There was a watchman relief system before but that no longer exists, so maybe we should have that reinstituted at the school.”

In this latest incident, he said, the school’s general workers realised something was amiss when they arrived at work to find cleaning supplies such as dishwashing liquid “on the outside” and that “windows were tampered with”.

BUT shop steward Pedro Shepherd.

“They called the principal, who would have communicated with the police that the school was broken into,” he said, adding that the incident disrupted classes. Students and teachers moved to the field to await word from police that it was safe to re-enter the school.