Saudi Gazette report

TAIF — The Ministry of Education has blamed the lack of specialized cadres in its department of safety and security as the main reason for undermining school safety, according to the Arabic daily Al-Madina on Monday.

“There is not enough number of specialized safety engineers, technicians, supervisors or safety guards in schools,” the ministry said in a statement.

According to the ministry, these jobs are temporarily being filled by teachers who have not enough training on matters of safety and security.

The ministry said the other factors affecting safety in schools include the recurrent electricity faults and short circuits, power overloads and the use of outdated electrical equipment.

The ministry has established a department for safety and security in 2012 but it was unable to employ trained cadres.

It said the use of school buildings for both morning and evening shifts and their extensive use during the summer months without due consideration for their capacity had led to overloads, which threatened the safety of schools.

“There are some educational programs requiring electricity supply such as the computer labs, the projectors and others. This represented an extra burden on the power supply,” the ministry said.

It said the use of old and obsolete electricity connections was another factor affecting safety.

The ministry said it would contract an electricity company to make periodical checks on the power supply in the school buildings.

According to the ministry, there are 38,388 schools in all educational stages for boys and girls. They include 14,053 elementary schools, 8,576 intermediate schools and 5,794 secondary schools, in addition to 3,272 kindergartens, 1,956 schools for adult education, 2,622 schools for special education and 2,095 schools for foreign education.