ISLAMABAD // Children in Pakistan return to classes on Monday amid haphazard efforts to protect them after Taliban militants massacred 132 pupils at a school in Peshawar.
Schools across the country are set to open for the first time since the December 16 attack, which prompted the government to cancel ongoing end-of-term examinations to avoid a follow-up strike. The 15-day winter holiday was extended by a week to review and enhance security arrangements at thousands of state and private institutions.
Schools have been ordered to secure their premises by installing closed-circuit cameras to monitor barricaded entrance gates and boundary walls, which must be raised to eight feet in height and topped with two feet of razor wire.
They have also been told to hire armed security guards, equipped with hand-held metal detectors.
With the majority of institutions failing to meet these security requirements, it remained unclear how many schools would be allowed to reopen.
Security levels are highly uneven across the country’s schools, depending on the income of students’ families and whether they were located in urban or rural areas, while school leaders said the government had been slow to help.
Many parents also said they were unprepared to risk their children’s safety by sending them back to school. They accused the government and school authorities of a widespread failure to reassure them that action was being taken to improve security or to communicate when schools would be reopening.
“Behind the government’s announcements, officials in all concerned departments are all seeking to shirk responsibility,” said an official at the federal directorate of education, which is responsible for all state schools in the capital Islamabad. “Their only concern is to position themselves so they won’t be blamed if a school is attacked by terrorists.”
The students at institutions with the highest levels of security will be those attending high-end private schools in Pakistan’s major cities.
Many of these students fall within the Taliban’s clearly identified target category: the children of security personnel, government officials and politicians — all of whom have been driving a military counteroffensive against the group’s strongholds in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.
Most of the recently ordered security measures were already in place at such institutions, having being implemented during a previous spate of terrorist attacks on so-called “soft targets” at the height of the Pakistani Taliban’s insurgency in 2009 and 2011. Schools have charged parents extra to cover the cost of these measures.
Wealthier institutions have also been ordered by the government to hire retired military special forces’ snipers, to be positioned on school-rooftop vantage points.
From Monday, the level of protection at other schools, where students’ families are not a part of Pakistan’s social elite, will range between the standard security measures ordered by the government and no protection at all, government officials and school principals said.
Inspections carried out last week of nearly 450 state schools and colleges in Islamabad found most to be poorly protected, if at all, said the officials.
Even several of the capital’s 20-plus “model” state schools lacked secure boundary walls, with squatters and criminal gangs entering their premises.
At the Islamabad College for Girls in F-6 sector, the city’s oldest and most expensive area, 7,000 students were due to resume classes on Monday. While the school had a well-protected roadside entrance, the building’s side and rear walls were broken in many places, or used by residents of an adjacent shanty as supporting structures.
A nearby basic government school, attended by children from the shanty, had no boundary walls at all. The only security personnel at this, and other such schools, was a couple of untrained watchmen who function mostly as errand-runners.
Despite the government’s ordered security measures, one state school principal in Islamabad said they had been denied approval by supervising government departments to urgently repair and raise boundary walls from existing school funds – a problem affecting a number of schools. Principals, officials and supervising government departments all expressed fears that much-needed wall repairs would take months to be approved and funded and end up subject to exploitation by corrupt officials and government contractors.
In Rawalpindi’s Sadiqabad area, Amir Meer, the principal and owner of a 38-year-old private school popular among working-class residents and small-business owners, said he had ordered new security equipment in late December before receiving official instructions, based on what he had seen in the Pakistani media.
It was not until Wednesday that he was visited by government officials, who delivered a checklist of the required measures to be put in place. They returned just two days later to check compliance.
“I can feel the [Punjab provincial] government are trying to get the job done, but it will take time for the authorities to survey the several thousand schools located just in Rawalpindi, and longer to ensure the correct implementation of the security measures,” the father of three daughters said.
Three other principals of private schools expressed frustration at the inconvenience of the security measures, however, and at a government order banning them from passing on the associated costs to parents. One said he was concerned about scaring parents into withdrawing students from his school, while another was contemplating closing their business altogether.
Meanwhile, the lack of communication from government officials and school authorities has angered and panicked many parents, with some telling The National they had decided not to send their children to school on Monday. Some said they were considering home schooling their children, while others even favoured a nationwide shutdown of institutions.
While some parents had been sent text messages informing them of the reopening dates for their children’s schools, or been advised to check social media sites for updates, the vast majority were forced to rely on notices posted at locked school gates. Very few had been sent letters from schools, or called into meetings to discuss security measures.
Raza Tufail, a mid-ranking civil servant resident in Lahore, said the schools attended by his three children, and those of his neighbours and friends, had acted “highly irresponsibly”.
“Parents are under immense psychological pressure because they have been communicated with by the schools and still have no idea what will happen to their kids,” he said.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
