Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) said yesterday that the city's Education Bureau and schools had overlooked the importance of resolving the problem of bullying on campus.
Chen said city government agencies should acknowledge the issue and study how to ensure campus security.
“I will put Deputy Mayor Lee [Yung-te (李永得)] in charge. I want to see updated reports and statistics every six months,” she said.
Chen was responding to concerns raised on the council floor by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) City Councilor Lin Kuo-cheng (林國正) about campus security.
Lin accused the city government of failing to take campus security seriously.
Lin cited the latest statistics from the National Police Agency (NPA) showing that the city's crime rate had reached 6.28 criminals per 100,000 people, while Taipei City only had a crime rate of 3.53 offenders per 100,000 people.
NPA data also showed that the number of teenagers on drugs in Kaohsiung was about 1.78 times that in Taipei City, Lin said.
Chen said many school bullies or teenage drug addicts in the city were from economically disadvantaged families or were dropouts, but the city government would never give up on them.
“The issue of campus security is a matter of conscience,” Chen said, adding that the city government would never evade the issue.
In other news, the city's Economic Development Bureau urged residents of Dapingding (大坪頂) to learn to live in harmony with the Caprimulgus affinis after residents complained about the noise made by the birds.
Bureau director-general Liu Hsin-cheng (劉馨正) said an increasing number of the rare birds, commonly known as the Savanna Nightjar, had migrated to urban areas in recent years.
Many Siaogang District (小港) residents had complained about having difficulty sleeping because of the constant chirping made by the birds during the mating season, Liu said.
Saying that the mating season would last through August, Liu urged residents to strike a balance between their lives and protection of the birds.
A preclearance service to facilitate entry for people traveling to select airports in Japan would be available from Thursday next week to Feb. 25 at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, Taoyuan International Airport Corp (TIAC) said on Tuesday. The service was first made available to Taiwanese travelers throughout the winter vacation of 2024 and during the Lunar New Year holiday. In addition to flights to the Japanese cities of Hakodate, Asahikawa, Akita, Sendai, Niigata, Okayama, Takamatsu, Kumamoto and Kagoshima, the service would be available to travelers to Kobe and Oita. The service can be accessed by passengers of 15 flight routes operated by
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