Director of Education Lionel Sands said yesterday the school-policing program re-introduced by the Christie administration last year has had a "marginal" impact on incidents of violence in the public school system.
Sands was responding to questions from The Nassau Guardian on the impact those 200 police officers have had on school campuses.
"I would say it's marginal. I wouldn't say it's very significant because there are certain schools where you don't have [incidents] even without police," he said.
"There are just certain schools where incidents do not happen. There are [other] schools where we have seen marginal decline in the incidences happening."
In the absence of statistics, Sands said, "All I'm giving you now is my recollection of what happened in the past and what happened this particular school year (2012/2013)."
But the education director said any initiative that helps to reduce the level of incidents, particularly in schools which have had major violent attacks and stabbings in previous years is "tremendous." Sands used Government High School as an example of where altercations among students were reported almost every other day on and off the school's campus.
He suggested the presence of police officers, and the searches they conduct, has also had some impact on students' ability to bring or exchange weapons on school campuses.
"Obviously, there are students who are able to get weapons in the school compound by going around the perimeter of the school and dropping them over the fence, and then once they get inside they are able to go and collect these weapons," Sands said.
"The constant monitoring of the perimeter of the school by the security [team] has also reduced the incidences of violence because the weapons are not available to the students." Sands said the security system and security personnel throughout the public school system have been beefed up, including implementing more closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in more schools.
"These have all helped to thwart the kind of action that you would have seen in the past," he said. "As we work toward getting more security, more CCTV cameras and those kinds of things this will help to bring the incidences down where schools are vandalized, where they are broken into and things are taken from the schools."
Sands indicated that the Ministry of Education must do a better job of keeping records of reported incidents in public schools.
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