Disturbing acts of Vandalism at Sacred Heart

Bernadine Martinez

Over two hundred students from standards four and five at Sacred Heart Primary in San Ignacio were not in their classrooms today. A total of eight classrooms were hit by vandals over the weekend and when the kids showed up this morning, they had to be sent back home. But this incident is not the first time the school has been targeted. According to the Principal, Bernadine Martinez, it has been an ongoing problem and despite assistance from police, the culprits have not been caught and continue to terrorize the school. Materials belonging to both students and teachers were stolen while some were simply destroyed. It was the same M.O. in the previous incidents but this time the vandals took the defacement to much more disturbing level, as Martinez explains.

Bernadine Martinez, Sacred Heart Primary School

“For the past three months, we’ve been enduring a lot of vandalism. The school has been vandalized on a regular basis; sometimes two or three times for the month. And what happen is that when these people vandalize the school and they come in, they destroy a lot of things. They destroy the materials, the charts, the children’s work, the teachers’ portfolio, the children’s portfolios and they steak things like globe and other materials that they can find like markers and everything that we have to be paying for. To add insult to injury, they do not only steal the stuff and destroy the stuff, this weekend here they went into the standard five buildings and what they did was, on top of destroying the teacher’s material and the students’ material, they also took human feces and paste it all over the desks and chairs in the classroom and the teachers desks and chairs and all over the floor. And so that’s the type of thing that we had to go through this weekend. We came yesterday—we took out of our families’ day—to come and clean up and clean up the mess just to find out this morning when we came that it was done also in a standard four class. So we had to ask for a non-school day with the permission of management and ministry personnel so that we can clean up the place and call the Health Department personnel to come in and help is to see that everything is safe, healthy before our children can come back into an environment like this.”

Delahnie Bain

“About how many kids did you have to send home?”

Bernadine Martinez

“We sent home over two hundred kids.”

Delahnie Bain

“And you mentioned that you have security guards. Did they see or hear anything?”

Bernadine Martinez

“We do, we have two. What happen is that they change shifts. I think what they are doing is—I don’t know if these people live around here but like they study the movements of the security and I believe they come here in the evening, late evenings.”

The students return to school on Tuesday. Martinez says that St. Andrews Anglican School in San Ignacio has also been targeted by vandals.