Regional ministers of education commit to school safety programme

Ministers of Education and other representatives ended a two-day meeting here yesterday with a firm commitment to guarantee safe school plants and a specific plan of action for the programme going forward.
The first Caribbean Safe School Ministerial Forum, hosted by the Ministry of Educaton, was aimed at promoting and rasing public awareness on three pillars of school safety.
Deputy Director of the Caribbean Disaster and Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) Elisabeth Riley said the declaration speaks to specific actions that ministers have committed to undertake within their local jurisdictions looking at schools’ resilience, implementing priority measures and how progress will be measured.
“It is very important not just to decide on the actions that we want to take in terms of policies and programmes and how we are enhancing the schools’ curricula, and to say to what extent have we been able to undetake the actions that we committed to and the barriers to us taking other actions,” Riley said.
The Worldwide Initiative for Safe Schools (WISS) is a government-led global partnership for advancing safe school implementation, as conceived in the High-Level Dialogue Communiqué of the Fourth Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (May 2013) which was approved during the Third World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in 2015 in Sendai, Japan.
According to Riley, now that the safe school programme is in place, regional leaders will be able to apply all the different concepts within the programme to the development of new facilities.
(More in today’s Daily Observer)