Does School safety need our special attention>

Does School Safety need our special attention?

Over a last decade and more, I had been talking on this issue at several platforms. The school safety issues are becoming extremely sensitive and critical, that no longer these can be marginalized as secondary to a school management system. Thousands of cases of neglect of safety in schools have happened and they continue to happen. No one cares on the relevance and importance of this issue,  just because those small children have no voice and when it attracts the attention of the parents, the protests lead to different dimensions, leaving the core issue thrown into a dustbin.

It is not just getting the building safety certificate from a local authority that ensures safety.. infrastructure is just one dimension, though important; several school management systems like water, sanitation, transport, weather threats, natural hazards, impact of political on social conflicts in the safety of children within schools and outside, man made disasters are but a few to mention. .. there are a lot more..

To add, emotional safety of the students in schools is another important dimension that has hardly been discussed as a principled exercise. Issues relating to the growth profile, emotional inadequacies arising out of family disputes, adolescent issues, impact of social media and technology both as misuse and abuse, bullying, kidnapping, drug and alcoholism and gender/sex related problems need a comprehensive approach. Sporadic attempts have been made now and then. Piecemeal exercises have addressed when an issue becomes critical. But, guidelines, rules, regulations and directions need to be incorporated in the procedures leading to the grant of recognition and affiliation of schools.

To ignore many of these that don’t happen in a single school is no justification for downsizing this issue. The existing guidelines are neither specific, nor focused and non-directional. We raise hue and cry oftentimes as reactors to the situations, and thanks now-a-days, media has a lot to bite on them.. And hence we jointly make noise. It is time that we put things into action and stream line the governance of school systems with specific focus on safety in schools.

A number of countries, world over, have separate commissions looking after this issue. I had suggested in one of my earlier books on school safety published nearly five years before, the need for a National commission on school safety supported by the state commissions with experts drawn from different related fields to give a comprehensive focus on this issue..Well, the time may not be too far when the Government may be forced to take this action, but it is wise to act before we are driven to the dead end. With the National policy of education, on the anvil, it would be the right time to address this issue.