Protecting students’ mental health

Government has sent a strong signal it will be seeking to protect the mental and emotional health of the youth in this island.

Announcing the introduction of a mental health committee, during a ministerial statement and press conference on Thursday evening, Minister of Education, Technological and Vocational Training, Santia Bradshaw, said this was necessary in gauging where students were psychologically when they returned to the classroom in Term Three, due to the disruption the Covid-19 pandemic has caused.

Bradshaw noted her ministry held consultations with officials from the Health Ministry, the Psychiatric Hospital and counsellors who have held talks with students, parents and teachers over the last months and made the decision to take this route.

“As we return to the classroom environment, it is our intention that we will establish a mental health and wellness committee to be able to look at how our children have fared during this period, as well as our teachers. And, it is not something that we want to do just as a one off.

“We want to ensure that we can follow the progress of these students, and to provide the necessary support to them, as well as to their teachers over the course of at least the next three years, because it has not been easy for any of us or any of them to be able to cope with this particular transition,” she stated.

In addition, she said school safety monitors will once again be a feature at the various educational plants across the island.

“There was a recent study that was done by UNICEF, which indicated that one of the things that place Barbados head and shoulders above all other Caribbean territories, was the fact that from the early stages of this pandemic, we were able to place safety monitors within our schools and those school monitors, thankfully, were able to assist the teachers in the school environment and the principals in ensuring that our students sanitise their hands, that they kept the physical distancing, and of course that they were wearing their masks, as much as possible,” Bradshaw added.