JTA head wants more social workers to tackle gangs in schools

While stakeholder collaboration has put a dent in gang violence and activities in schools, a senior educator says social workers are urgently needed to tackle the problem from the root.

Leighton Johnson, president of the Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), said his organisation wants an increase in the number of social workers that are assigned to each of the seven regions of the Ministry of Education.

“With the number of cases and the nature of the incidents that confront us as educators in the classroom, we heavily rely on social workers to complement what we do and what our guidance counsellors do,” Johnson told The Gleaner on Monday.

The JTA boss noted there was an upsurge of gang-related activity in schools when the institutions returned to face-to-face classes after the pandemic forced classes online for two years. Since that time, he said a coordinated effort has been made to tackle the problem.

“What we found in many instances is that a lot of these youngsters, their home and community situation were really depressing, so we continue to ask the Ministry of Education, through the social workers as well as other social interventions, to intervene where these students continue to show disruptive and violent behaviours. We ask them to get to the bottom of it, to visit the homes where the school sometimes cannot reach,” Johnson said.

However, he pointed out that support has been sought from the education ministry, but owing to the inadequate number of social workers, the intervention is not as effective or efficient as desired.

“They can’t spend as much time treating with one case on the basis that there are several other cases that are awaiting their attention,” Johnson noted.

The JTA head said that prior to the onset of COVID-19 in Jamaica, extensive work was done to eradicate gangs from the nation’s schools.

Change of environment

He added that the police worked closely with school administrators to identify youngsters who were features of various syndicates in different sections of the island and breakthroughs were made in dismantling many of the gangs in schools.

He said that schools were able to provide a change of environment for the disruptive students and engaged in partnerships to have different students move from one school to another with principals agreeing to the switchover.

He admitted that school boards had to expel some students as a result of their unwillingness to relinquish a particular lifestyle.

According to Johnson, administrators now rely on the pre-pandemic mechanisms with the police and school resource officers called on to intervene when necessary. The institutions also rely heavily on external stakeholders to mentor students.

Further, Johnson said that partnerships have been forged with justice centres to provide counselling and behaviour modification strategies for students to get them to break away from the syndicates.

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