30 SROs to be Added to Safe Schools Programme for September

In order to meet the expected demand for School Resource Officers (SROs) come September, the Safe Schools Secretariat will be training an additional 30 police personnel, bringing the total number of SROs to 144.
The police will be trained in school safety planning, informed Chairman of the Safe Schools Secretariat, Lieutenant Colonel Oral Khan.
He told JIS News that the latest thrust would add to the existing pool of police officers that were already involved in the programme and ensure that there was adequate personnel to serve in the case of promotions or transfers.
“We are seeking to identify new officers to complement the existing number of SROs. If we find that there is anyone employed, who did not complete the training, then we may include one or more of those persons, but the aim is to train new persons,” he explained.
According to Colonel Khan, the school safety planning component was a follow up to the initial training of officers in mediation and conflict resolution techniques.
He explained that training in safety planning would make SROs more aware of the peculiarities of working within the school environment. “The first aspect of the training to be done would focus on those skills that SROs would need to be able to operate within schools,” he pointed out.
Additionally, he said, the SROs would be able to help schools to prepare plans for enhancing safety and security as well as plan responses to incidents; boost security of the schools in terms of student behaviour and conduct; and decide on action to be taken if problems occur.
According to Colonel Khan, the Ministry of Education and Youth has mandated schools to include a safety plan in their development strategy, but, because the skill was not readily available to the schools, the idea of using this design had been neglected. However, this will be changed when the training programme was completed.
“By training police officers.they will be able to offer some assistance to schools in preparing safety plans,” he pointed out.
The chairman informed that after training, the officers would be deployed to a number of schools so as to satisfy the needs of institutions that were requesting the support of the Safe Schools Programme. “If we have more trained persons available for the task, then this will definitely be an asset to the Safe Schools Programme and will ensure that schools are safer,” he stated.
The Safe Schools Programme was instituted in November 2004 as part of government initiative to tackle the problem of violence in schools.
To date, a total of 114 police officers have been trained as SROs, with 97 dispatched to 92 schools. An additional 36 SROs should be added to the complement by June 2007.