by YVETTE BEST

TOUGH LOVE is coming for indisciplined secondary school students.

It is in the form of a new custodial educational institution, where misbehaving students may be sent for periods of between six months and a year.

Minister of Education and Human Resource Development, Ronald Jones, gave the news on Wednesday as he spoke at Deighton Griffith Secondary School's Speech Day.

The school, which should be open by the start of the new school year in September, is one of three to four new secondary schools planned.

Jones said the first school would be similar to the Edna Nicholls Centre, which deals with students who misbehave.

Zeroing in on the word "discipline" in the school's motto Discipline Guarantees Success, Jones stressed that, just like Deighton Griffith, a former school principal, the ministry was going to be very firm with discipline at the new school.

"In the shortest possible time, there are going to be other settings beyond the Edna Nicholls Centre for those who are not comfortable in this kind of setting . . . to give those who want to learn an opportunity to learn," Jones said.

He said if that environment was not conducive to a reforming or reshaping of their behaviour, stricter measures would be employed.

"We will take them away from the spoiling atmosphere of the communities and the homes and place them in a custodial environment, to bring about that change," he explained.

Unlike what currently obtains at the Edna Nicholls Centre, Jones said students could be at the new school for six months to a year. He assured the audience that while students would be away from their regular schools and communities, they would still be engaged in academic and extra-curricular pursuits.

At the same time, it would give the schools from which they were removed a chance "to breathe easier", he said.

"You might not like that, but the society has to come up with structures to make things better for everybody concerned. And these will be added to other educational institutions within our education environment," the minister added.

The proposed institution has "100 per cent support" from the Barbados Union of Teachers (BUT).

President Karen Best told the WEEKEND NATION yesterday the union was "happy and we're hoping that it happens sooner rather than later".

"There are children who cannot be catered to in a normal setting, and you cannot allow those children to be in a setting from nine to three, and then allow them to go home into the same environment that is responsible for the behaviour," said Best, adding the union had been calling for a boot camp-like setting for the past four years.

Jones also said the additional schools would address the problem of overcrowding at places like Deighton Griffith Secondary, as well as utilise areas in the east and south of the island.

He identified St Philip and St George as locations for two of the schools, stating that the rolls would not exceed 800 in each case. According to him, the decentralisation would ease traffic congestion and allow those students who learnt at different rates to remain in the system until they turned 18.