Roundtable meets campus crime head-on

by Krystal Paco

Guam - To combat the repeated cases of crime on school campuses, members from the Guam Legislature, the Department of Education, and the Guam Police Department met Tuesday night for a roundtable discussion on the evident need to elevate school security. DOE interim superintendent Taling Taitano said, "Over a hundred breakins last school year and have estimated over $100,000 worth of materials and labor from our Maintenance Department."

She added that inclusive are costs to replace collateral equipment, "and a lot of the times we just don't have it in our budget."

Besides efforts to install surveillance cameras at several of the island's schools, DOE student support services administrator Chris Anderson says there is a project in the works to use federal grant money to pay to have five probation officers act as school resource officers during school hours to support administration with not only criminal activity, but also student behavior issues.

"These five SROs are going to be based out of the five high schools; they'll be providing support to all the feeder schools that tie into that high school," she said.

Speaker Judi Won Pat noted on the topic of campus vandalism, "If these individuals are going to be here on school sites - correct me if I'm wrong - almost all the vandalism occurs at night. Are these SROs working at night at those five high schools?" to which Anderson replied, "It's not that they could not be used at night time, but our initial conception on how we were going to use them was when the students were there."

Chairman of the Committee on Public Safety Senator Adolpho Palacios then added, "This arrangement of dipping into other agencies resources doesn't sit well with me…why burden other agencies with your problem?"

This led Taitano to say, "This problem is not just a DOE problem - it's a community problem. I think we need to work together to get this result."