By Jonathan Kumar

Permanent Secretary for Education, Selina Kuruleca says the Ministry must allow schools to liaise with parents before they can take any action.

This is in regards to posts on social media of students in uniform smoking Marijuana at a high school.

“There are several reports. One is of students smoking marijuana, the other one is students smoking cigarettes. All this comes to the school. The school provides a report to the Office of the Permanent Secretary. Before the school can do that, the school must get in touch with the parents, because these are children,” she said.

She adds that the procedure put in place to deal with this issue will be allowed to run its course.

“All schools have standard operating procedures, so they are quite aware of what they need to do. We continue to work with our Substance Abuse Advisory Council, as well as the Fiji Police and Social Welfare when we are addressing these issues,” says the Permanent Secretary.

Kuruleca says that the Ministry must wait for schools to file in a report as some of these are old pictures and must be verified.

“Case in point is there were some pictures circulating on social media of children crossing flooded waters. One was recent, the other was two or three years old. We can’t really get into all of this unless we have verification,” she added.