School Delinquency: Need To Step-up Vigilance

Final year and end-of-term examinations are taking place in schools across the country. Students are therefore expected to render account of their assiduity throughout the academic year 2023/2024. Their performance will equally serve as a pointer to how well their teachers succeeded in imparting knowledge in the students and even pupils during the school year. Parents on their part will be anxious to know how their kids performed.     
Yet, what many might be oblivious of is the fact that the results ought to simply be a reflection of the level of seriousness that the entire educational community invested in the academic year. Students who spent the school year with everything in their sacks except pens, pencils, books and other didactic materials will certainly not cope. In other words, the output will evidently be a reflection of the effort put in by all those involved in the educational process. A recent search operation by the police in some schools around Yaounde produced frightening results. Student had all sorts of light weapons in their bags including drugs and other prohibited items. Findings by the security officers even exposed gory facts. Students had codes that permitted them to carry out delinquent and criminal acts under cover. The presumption is that both parents and the school administration might never have known about the existence of any such incriminating behaviour by the children.     
What this means is that as the children write their examinations and prepare to take a holiday break, there is need to carve out strategies to better combat the vices that have been growing within the educational milieu over the years. The educational chain requires that students leave from homes to schools. In situations where they pick-up harmful items from the streets or in any of their hideouts along the way to school, those in charge of discipline within the school milieu should be able to identify such dangerous objects and pull them out. It therefore demands a strong synergy of action involving the teachers, students, and parents to isolate bad seeds from the grain. Within the classrooms therefore, students should be made to denounce any of their mate found in vile behaviour. That also goes for the safety of the students themselves. Condoning a classmate who carries dangerous objects could be like accepting to share space with a snake. Parents who often have the tendency of defending their children even for wrongdoing, ought to know that they are equally encouraging monsters that would not only be nefarious to society, but also back in their homes.     
It is not as if most of the vices that are recorded within the school environment today are totally strange. What happens is that every epoch comes with its own realities and challenges. The various deviant attitudes that students demonstrate on a regular basis are the direct result of what they see and hear around them. This falls back on the growing peer influence and the widespread nature of the social media and its negative effects. Most of the movies on television screens and the smartphones that children carry along are potential sources of messages that have the high potency to distort the mind-set of even the most innocent child. It means that parental control remains a key component in the search for solutions to the various deviant character traits that students are being identified with in several towns and villages across the country. It equally means that no matter the results that children may have at the end of the current examination session, their holiday period should be an opportunity to sample some of the wrongdoings that they or their mates might have been involved in and the right measures put in place to ensure that the kids are on the right track.     
There is no justificat...