Boarding school is supposed to serve as solution for troubled teens because it provides education and therapy for teenagers struggling with negative behavior or rebellion.
Students live in the school for an extended period of time while participating in academic, therapeutic and recreational activities, especially that it ensures concentration of study.
The other side of the coin is that the collective living environment of boarding schools is likely to resulting in students being more affected by the bad habits and behaviors of other students, and even makes them more susceptible to suffering from bullying, both of which would have a long-term negative impact on students’ physical and mental stay.
Recently, a 12-year old boy named Sylvester Oromoni, student of Dowen College, Lagos State was allegedly beaten to death by his fellow students for refusing to join cult. This is horrible!
We saw on the social media, female students of a government boarding school fighting dirty, this could also result to another death save the intervention of some students, not even the dorm teacher.
Where are the guidance, matrons and patrons of these boarding schools. There’s supposed to be a dorm master who is a teacher, in charge of and supervises a residential house of boarding school students. He or she in many ways becomes a surrogate parent providing stability and guidance for the mercurial adolescents in his care. Where are the head of school and boarding masters and mistresses.
The government needs to begin to make implementable laws to checkmate the activities of the boarding schools.
The Dowen boys who were said to be cultists must have been initiated by a teacher, so that the vulnerable boys are sent out to bullying others who are not.
Unfortunately, the bad economy where the father and mother of the house go to work to make ends meets has also necessitated the patronage of boarding schools, otherwise, why cannot the parents allow their children to go to school from home. Could it be laziness on the part of the mothers or caregivers that boarding schools are in the increase with their attendant negative consequences.
Today, the boarding schools have become center for all sorts of crime by young boys who are supposed to be there studying.
The leadership of the boarding schools are only interested in collecting huge sums of money and then they leave the students at the mercy of their fellow students, especially those who are evil.
It is about time the state and federal governments put measures in place to checkmate who the operators of the boarding schools are so that they do not become breeding ground for criminality and violence.
