Education Minister Says Threats to Schools Treated Seriously

The faculty and staff, as well as the student body at Saint Martin de Porres School, returned to the compound this morning, following a bomb threat on Thursday.  The ominous warning that a grenade would be detonated on the school grounds prompted the administration to take decisive action.  Principal Annie Palacio wasted no time contacting the Belize Police Department which deployed officers into the area to establish a presence outside of the school.  The situation has since returned to a sense of normalcy and today we caught up with Minister of Education Patrick Faber who spoke briefly on the threat.

Patrick Faber

Patrick Faber, Minister of Education

“Well as you know, we have to take all of these threats very seriously.  When I was growing up in primary school, in fact the common thing that was occurring there was bomb scares and so on and it came to a point where there were these pranks on a regular basis and nothing ever materialized.  But we have to take, especially given the recent circumstances of the military forces finding, the police force especially, finding grenades, we have to take these threats very seriously and so we took no chance yesterday.  We urge people not to do these kinds of pranks, they simply waste the time of our professional folks, military folks especially, but also the schools.  And you know that we struggle to get in as much content time with our children as is possible, so something like that is not good at all for the children and for the education system and for Belize overall.”