www.goinghomedotcom.org - Nyangua How to deal with drug taking students

Headteachers: how to deal with drug using students

Many headteachers and indeed teachers did not know the symptoms of drug taking and even when they come across students who are using alcohol or other drugs, they do not know how to handle them.

Mr. C.T. Gituai Programme Coordinator, Capacity Building, National Agency for the Campaign Against Drug Abuse (NACADA) made this observation while briefing teachers after a one day drug awareness seminar, in Kiritiri, Mbeere District.

Held at Nyangua Secondary School which hosted 15 high schools, five primary schools or 2,034 students and 91 teachers, the function covered diverse topics as 'effects of alcohol, miraa (khat) and inhalants on the individual' by Dr. Peter Gaku a Clinical Pharmacist to 'The Real Deal - A sharing of a real life experience' by this writer.

Many headteachers resorted to expelling drug using students which Gituai said they had come to find was counter-productive. "When you expel that person, you are not helping that person" but instead "you spoil that person, because you are the one who understands that fellow."

He adviced them instead to find out why that person was using drugs instead of expelling them which was the easier option but did not solve the problem and instead merely exported it to another school.

Reasons for this child using drugs could be even due to the fact that the students parents were themselves using drugs or creating other situations which were stressful to the child.

Young people also look at you as very old people who 'don't understand' and as they are also undergoing adolescence, they are very aggressive thus you are bound to end up in conflict with them. Coupled with this is the fact that many of you are also undergoing your own midlife crisis and therfor have your own problems and uncertainties to resolve and thust it is very hard for these two sets of people each undergoing change to see eye to eye.

Meanwhile young people view the teachers as people who do not understand them and are therefore to be fought. "That is why you find campus students fighting with the government and the police who they know ahve guns, but they will still fight them armed only with stones if the peer leader says, because to them the peer leader is more important than the P.C. the D.C. or the Chief. That is why in your time you fought with the police and now your children fight with the police."

Gituai noted that most of the management problems in schools stemmed from drugs, but the problem was that many school heads were absent from their schools and so never even knew when a strike was impending. "You have to even know how drugs come to your schools. At the same time we blame the students, but we are also the partakers of these same drugs" were are telling them not use. Thus we have no moral authority when you smoke, or when the students carry you with both legs back to your quarters after you become drank while drinking with them.

This is also coupled with denial, "so don't know how we are going to deal with that because don't want to ineterfere in your personal life. In one school in Nairobi, a girls school there was a teacher fresh from campus wearing a mini-skirt and smoking. So this then becomes the role model for the girls."

The lack of role models for students was also a big problem lamented the NACADA Official as he recalled "when I was young we used to admire teachers with their shiny bicycles and say when 'I grow up want to be a teacher and be respected and have a bicycle' But today no role models for the young. We smoke, use vulgar langauge around them, we should desist. If you are a smoker do not smoke around them, or where they can see you.".

Learning how to tell which students and even teachers who were using drugs was of paramount importance because people who were using "lead two lives. You can see a child is well behaved and obedient but when alone becomes a totally different person. You heard how David (reffering to this writer's sharing of his story) told us he used to fool his teachers and parents when they were around. So these students or teachers can even be suppliers and you make a prefect, again how David told us he was made a school prefect, and since you don't know how to tell symptoms you have now even ended up putting them in a position of power. So you have to know the symptoms he concluded.

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