The Taipei City Government is to install alarms in student restrooms, Taipei Department of Education Commissioner Tang Chih-min (湯志民) said yesterday in response to demands by city councilors.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilors yesterday grilled Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) over school safety policies, saying city government policies had led to a systemic school safety problem and that the city had failed to implement meaningful reforms.
Yesterday’s cross-examination followed the murder of an eight-year-old female student whose throat was cut by an attacker at her elementary school on Friday last week. The suspected killer, 29-year-old Kung Chung-an (龔重安), reportedly crept into school grounds by climbing over low wall.
Photo: Chen Chih-chu, Taipei Times
In response to comments by Tang that the city government would halt moves to lower the walls around between 30 and 40 elementary schools, Taipei City Councilor Wang Chih-ping (汪志冰) of the KMT said the city government should not “flip-flop” on its policy of “open campuses,” questioning whether higher barrier walls would improve campus safety.
Instead, she urged the Department of Education to install alarms in all elementary school restrooms to ensure that students would be able to call for help if an incident occurs. She said that alarm bells are only installed in restrooms for disabled students.
Tang agreed to her demand, saying that the alarms would be installed by the beginning of the fall semester.
KMT Taipei City Councilor Tai Shi-chin (戴錫欽) also accused the city government of failing to ensure that schools have an adequate number of guards, citing city government statistics showing that more than half of elementary and junior high schools employ only two guards.
Because guards have differing shifts, inadequate staffing means that schools have windows of time when only one guard is present, he said, calling for the city government to require that two guards are present at all times to ensure that there is always at least one person monitoring the surveillance cameras.
Separately yesterday, Minister of the Interior Chen Wei-zen (陳威仁) said that police have been ordered to increase the number of patrols around schools.
The National Police Agency has ordered local police stations to ramp up security measures around schools, especially immediately before and after the school day, Chen said.
However, responding to calls to establish a police presence on campuses, Chen said that in the past, patrol routes have avoided entering school premises out of respect for the autonomy of the education system, adding that police would consider on-campus patrols only at the request of the school.
Taiwan Association for Human Rights legal affairs specialist Hsu Jen-shuo (許仁碩) said that the merits of having patrol routes that run through schools should be reconsidered.
He said that a balance should be maintained between stopping violent crime and police interference in education — such as when prosecutors searched the dormitories at National Cheng Kung University for illegally downloaded music files in 2002.
The recent wave of rallies against the government’s revised high-school curriculum guidelines, which have swept more than 100 high schools nationwide, illustrate that political rights remain an important issue among students, including children, Hsu said.
“I am not against police going after criminals on campus when criminal activity occurs,” Hsu said. “However, infringement of academic freedom in the name of security is actually quite common.”
He also questioned the benefits of diverting the nation’s strained police forces to school patrols, as schools are “relatively much safer” than many other locations.
“We should not see campuses as extremely dangerous locations just because a solitary severe crime occurred on campus,” he said.
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