Students want Reid to get real about grooming policy
THE PENDING national policy on grooming in schools is not likely to find favour with the umbrella organisation which represents students’ councils across Jamaica.
“That’s not helping anybody,” Alnastázia Watson, outgoing president of the National Secondary Students’ Council (NSSC) told The Gleaner in response to yesterday’s Gleaner story headlined ‘Not hair police’.
Education Minister Ruel Reid is quoted as saying that the long overdue document prepared by the National Council on Education still gives school administrators a lot of discretion in determining the final standards for hairstyle and dress codes for students.
He was speaking at a Gleaner Editors forum on Thursday, a day after the NSSC issued a press release articulating the students’ frustration at the lack of a uniformed policy, with the discrepancies between different schools being a major concern. Watson said the failure to involve students in the decision-making process is at the heart of their concern and the education minister needs to become more involved.
“We are really calling on the minister to intervene because you can’t leave it to the schools’ discretion to come up with these policies. Somebody (else) needs to review them,” Watson argued, adding that most of the sanctions are ridiculous.
“You can’t deny students the right to an education and lock them out of school for half an inch off the skirt. Oftentimes, some of them (teachers) go outside with tape measure to measure the skirt. If you need a tape measure to measure, then it couldn’t be that bad. So we do want the minister to intervene and for some amount of consultation with students because, when consultations are being made, they are made with parents. My mother and father aren’t the ones wearing the uniform. I am the one wearing it!”