OCHO RIOS:
A PROPOSAL for the establishment of a Rapid Response Unit to deal with trauma cases in the school system has been made by university lecturer Dr. Claudette Crawford-Brown.
Dr. Brown's proposal anticipates that the unit would operate out of the Ministry of Education and would be staffed by counsellors and psychologists.
The lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Work at the University of the West Indies, made the suggestions at yesterday's opening session of the 36th annual conference of the Jamaica Teachers Association (JTA) at the Renaissance Jamaica Hotel in Ocho Rios.
"When you have a suicide in a school or when you have a child piercing another child's eye, that is something very traumatic in the school community and the poor teacher and the principal cannot cope with the seriousness of these issues," she told the roughly 300 delegates.
Dr. Brown's proposal, which is contained in a submission to the Ministry of Education, also includes a plan for the early detection of children who have emotional and psychological problems.
Under such a plan, she said, a team of social workers would be established to go to schools to assess problem students. From these assessments would come a determination of the best treatment for each child.
Speaking with The Gleaner later, Dr. Crawford-Brown welcomed the recent decision of the Ministry of Education to establish a rehabilitation and counselling centre for problem students as a way of curbing indiscipline and violence in the schools.
However, she argued that putting all problem students in one facility does not go far enough in dealing with the problem. She said different students have different problems and must be put in place to address their particular needs.
Meanwhile, Dr. Crawford-Brown challenged teachers to work more closely with persons from other disciplines to deal with the deterioration in levels of students' conduct in the schools.
