Greater Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) yesterday pledged to discipline school administrators who conceal or delay reports of school violence.
“We require that schools report all incidences of bullying immediately. Anyone found to have concealed or delayed such reports or who fails to deal with related cases will be severely punished. No one is immune,” Chen said.
However, to prevent schools from turning bullying reports into a competition, Chen said principals or schools will not receive a better performance review just because more bullying cases are reported.
Schools will be rewarded if they take the initiative to curb bullying, she added.
Chen called a provisional meeting yesterday morning to coordinate anti-bullying measures taken by different government branches in the wake of increased media focus on the subject of bullying between students and even students and teachers, prompting educational officials, civic groups and politicians across party lines to express concern and propose countermeasures.
Chen proposed raising school bullying from an issued dealt with by campus security to a public order issue, placing the city’s anti-bullying campaign directly under the supervision of the mayor.
Chen also ordered that the city’s Bureau of Education establish an anti-bullying commission.
In related news, a student at Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School jumped from the third floor of a school building yesterday morning. The student died after being rushed to the hospital.
The incident happened at around 9am when the student surnamed Ti (底), who was in the second year of one of the nation’s top high schools, asked his teacher for a toilet break, only to be found by the teacher and his classmates minutes later lying in a pool of blood having leaped from the third floor in an apparent suicide attempt. Hsu Chien-kuo (徐建國), director of academic affairs at the school, told the press that the student had been suffering from anxiety since the beginning of this semester.
According to Hsu, the student had been receiving counseling and taking medication.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching