Senior officials of the Ministry of Education, including the Minister, Daryll Matthew and Director of Education, Clare Browne, along with several counsellors spent Monday with students and staff at the Five Islands Primary School.
Both Minister Matthew and Director Browne spent time interacting with the students and their teachers listening, consoling and generally providing a ‘pillar of support’ as collective the school remains in a state of unease following the abduction and subsequent homicide of 9-year old Chantel Crump, a former student of the institution. She was reported missing on Wednesday and by Friday night/Saturday morning, her body was discovered at Weatherill’s beach.
Director Browne said the decision to visit the school came out of a realization that things at the school will not be ‘normal’ on Monday, the first full day of classes since the death of the minor.
“I wanted to be there for no other reason but to share in the grief and to give the school, the staff and students, the ministry’s full support. The minister had to leave after some time, but I stayed for practically the entire morning. The experience felt like a somber cloud hovered over the school during my time there,” he recalled.
According to Director Browne he went from class to class with his first stop being the Grade 4 class where Chantel was a student. “Just walking into the room and seeing the desk; a lone empty desk in the centre of the room with a flower placed on it that I felt an emptiness within myself and I know that this was the feeling of many persons at Five Islands Primary on Monday morning; something was missing; someone was missing; certainly Chantel Crump was missing from the school,” he declared.
The education senior official also noted that during discussions with the teachers, one teacher, through tears, exclaimed ‘I miss her, I miss her’. Director Browne reported that the ministry had reassigned a number of counsellors to Five Islands Primary during this period to help the students and staff cope with the loss of having a student die violently.
A total of 14 counsellors were at the school on Monday with the intention to work in pairs moving from classroom to classroom offering comfort for the students.
