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.
Kenting National Park service technician Yang Jien-fon (楊政峰) won a silver award in World Grand Prix Photography Awards Spring Season for his photograph of two male rat snakes intertwined in combat. Yang’s colleagues at Kenting National Park said he is a master of nature photography who has been held back by his job in civil service. The awards accept entries in all four seasons across six categories: architectural and urban photography, black-and-white and fine art photography, commercial and fashion photography, documentary and people photography, nature and experimental photography, and mobile photography. Awards are ranked according to scores and divided into platinum, gold and
More than half of the bamboo vipers captured in Tainan in the past few years were found in the city’s Sinhua District (新化), while other districts had smaller catches or none at all. Every year, Tainan captures about 6,000 snakes which have made their way into people’s homes. Of the six major venomous snakes in Taiwan, the cobra, the many-banded krait, the brown-spotted pit viper and the bamboo viper are the most frequently captured. The high concentration of bamboo vipers captured in Sinhua District is puzzling. Tainan Agriculture Bureau Forestry and Nature Conservation Division head Chu Chien-ming (朱健明) earlier this week said that the
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BREACH OF CONTRACT: The bus operators would seek compensation and have demanded that the manufacturer replace the chips with ones that meet regulations Two bus operators found to be using buses with China-made chips are to demand that the original manufacturers replace the systems and provide compensation for breach of contract, the Veterans Affairs Council said yesterday. Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Michelle Lin (林楚茵) yesterday said that Da Nan Bus Co and Shin-Shin Bus Co Ltd have fielded a total of 82 buses that are using Chinese chips. The bus models were made by Tron-E, while the systems provider was CYE Electronics, Lin said. Lin alleged that the buses were using chips manufactured by Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon Co, which presents a national security risk if the
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