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Police Regime in Public Schools

September 10, 2010
Shorena Ghlonti, Ozurgeti

Bailiffs will start working in public schools of Ozurgeti district from January of 2011. The ministry of education and science states that the only function of the bailiffs at schools will be care for the security of pupils and prevention of violence. However, people often say that the ministry is going to establish a police regime in public schools and teachers do not like to be controlled everywhere.

The head of the Ozurgeti district resource-center Lela Imedashvili does not agree with the opinion and stated that bailiffs without guns will have nothing in common with police and they will be subordinated to the ministry of education.

In most cases, children become victims of violence at school. Mostly they are oppressed by their friends and sometimes by teachers too.

Lela Imedashvili said bailiffs will control the general schooling process and will take care of the security of pupils. If we focus on the general practice of public schools, pupils have positive reaction on the introduction of bailiffs. There were not difficulties in their activities so far.

“People remember several bloody incidents at schools between school-children. The institute of bailiffs is one of the components of the safe school. Their duty is to prevent conflicts and crimes at schools and providing children with all kind of assistance. The bailiff cannot punish a child; just the opposite they should guarantee their security. There will be 3 bailiffs in each school – a woman and two men.

A bailiff can be a person of 20-45 years old of any profession. The selected people attend trainings in psychology and legislation after corresponding testing. The bailiffs will be placed in the special rooms equipped with information technologies; they wear uniforms and have communication equipment. The bailiffs have to control interior and exterior of the school building. A bailiff is entitled to evaluate the conflict situation and request the director to react on the fact in case of necessity. If the situation is very complicated, they can inform parents and even the ministry of the education about the incident. The bailiffs finish their work after lessons are over; however they cannot leave the school until every child leaves the school building,” said Imedashvili.

Psychologist Tea Gogotishvili said that before introduction of the bailiff institute into schools, they had to organize social discussions and consider the opinion of professionals. The innovation might be successful or unsuccessful but it is not the main point. The point is that nobody asked the opinion of the society and professionals. Introduction of this institution might have negative impact on the psychic of adults.

Gogotishvili added that journalists and people of other professions should be aware of psychology of an adult – it is urgently important; they should know the development level of a child, their character, emotions, etc in different situations. The specific of different ages is very important too. Knowledge of all these issues is important for a journalist in their activities in order not to do any harm to adults.

“Anonymity and confidentiality are very important in similar cases because it is very sensitive topic. Very often, people (mostly adults who have just started their lives) might be degraded by making their background details public. Those details are mostly associated with scandalous and negative events,” said Tea Gogotishvili.

School democratization manager at the non-governmental organization “Union of Young Teachers” Levan Mzhavanadze said the institute of bailiffs cannot be claimed to be extremely negative. The ministry of education and science had to create the institute because of increased number of violent accidents in public schools; they want to eradicate the problem with it. Furthermore, there are similar analogies in many states of Europe and in America too. Nevertheless, the issue was to be better considered and systemic changes were to be introduced parallel to sending bailiffs to schools.

Mzhavanadze thinks the reasons of violence shall be well identified (television, computer games, internet, etc), the program shall be worked out to increase the qualification of school psychologists; psychologists shall be better promoted at schools; they should be specially re-trained and several schools might share one psychologist.

Levan Mzhavanadze said that TV-programs shall be seriously reviewed. The films and cartoons about violence and soap operas should not be shown during day-time. The disciplinary committee shall be reinforced at schools. If the abovementioned changes are not introduced, we will approach to the human factor – that means the preparation of bailiffs and their personal traits will have particular importance. So, the institute of bailiffs will succeed in several schools while in some schools their presence will be useless.

A teacher from Ozurgeti district said she appreciates the institute of bailiffs particularly in city schools with many pupils where the risk of criminal incidents is quite high.

A teacher, who preferred to keep her name anonymous, said that bailiffs cannot change much at schools and police regime is being established in the country.

A pupil of the ninth form of the public school thinks that bailiff will restrict his freedom at school and children will feel themselves restricted.

Another pupil of the ninth form claims the opposite; he said he often had problems with his friends and bailiffs will always protect similar pupils at school. They will act kind of mediators between them and teachers too.

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