Education matters

And so in this Royal wedding week, in fact on the eve of the wedding, the news coverage of the braying and nonsense of people swathed in Union Jack flags was briefly interrupted to mention that, yet again, there had been another US school shooting in which as of today, 10 people had died.

Can you imagine what that felt like for the parents of the students at that school? Can you imagine getting a phone call or a message to say that there had been a shooting at your child’s school in Bahrain? Your blood would run cold. You would do everything you could to get there as quickly as you could and to hold your child in your arms, if you could.

Can you imagine how terrified the students were, knowing that what they have heard about in so many cases of extreme school violence around the world and seen on so many news reports, was happening to them. It must have been terrifying. 

And can you possibly even begin to imagine what was going through the mind of the sick individual who sought to get revenge, make his point or just generally get some attention, (although in this case we might find out as he is still alive and detained in custody) by planning and then executing a random mass murder?

Let’s hope we never have to know what these things feel like.

The thing is though, in my opinion, more must be done to keep children in Bahrain safe at school, no matter where they attend. I’ve had some very interesting conversations with parents whose children attend a variety of different schools on the island since my last article on this issue, most of whom couldn’t believe how easy it was to gain access, but who also who hadn’t previously given it a second thought. 

In order to once again highlight the current situation here, I conducted another experiment. 

This time, I used somebody else’s CPR to see if I could use it to gain full access to children and staff in school either playing or involved in lessons.

I walked up to the security guard, gave him my FEMALE friend’s CPR and presumed that I would be turned away. The guard didn’t look at the CPR and gave me a security pass which opened the door and allowed me in.

Now, when I pointed out the mistake that he had made, he wasn’t embarrassed or even apologetic, he got mad and asked me to leave, which is fine … but again, it was too little, too late.

I’m not asking for schools to employ prison-like security, but I am asking them and all those involved in education in Bahrain, to step up and examine their entrance and exit procedures just to see how watertight they really are since if your car has to be checked over when you visit a hotel or your bag has to be checked sometimes when you enter a shopping mall, at the very least shouldn’t there be a law that expects schools to have an agreed level of security to protect the children and staff inside, one that is regularly checked and if flaunted would lead to serious repercussions?

I don’t think that’s unreasonable at all.

Thank you for the comments I have received about this matter so far and please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your views on the security practices in your school.

The suspect in the Texas school shooting began his attack last Friday by firing a shotgun through an art classroom door, shattering a glass pane and sending panicked students to the entryway to block him from getting inside, witnesses said.

Dmitrios Pagourtzis, 17, fired again through the wooden part of the door and fatally hit a student in the chest. He then lingered for about 30 minutes in a warren of four rooms, killing seven more students and two teachers before exchanging gunfire with police and surrendering, officials said.

Meanwhile, students on Saturday were being let back inside Santa Fe High School to gather belongings they abandoned when the gunfire began. The school’s grief was on display at an evening baseball game where Santa Fe players had crosses painted on their faces and the initials of shooting victims written on tape around their wrists. The team also fashioned a tape cross over the dugout with 10 sets of initials and ‘missed but never forgotten’.