Twenty students from GS Ste Famille in Nyarugenge District were this week suspended for engaging in violent behaviour in what they called a “celebration”. The violence occurred on Thursday, June 17 in the afternoon after the students in question had finished their last paper of the academic year administered at the school level. All the 20 are senior three candidates and are due to sit their national examinations next month. They are accused of aggressively throwing stones on classrooms which led to destruction of the school property. This reporter was told that it required the intervention of local authorities and the police to contain the situation. Some of the stones and other objects that the students used to damage school property. /Courtesy Emmy Ngabonziza, Nyarugenge District Administrator, told The New Times Friday that the act was not a protest because the students were not arguing against anything; instead, they were bizarrely celebrating the end of senior three exams. “It was after they had completed their ordinary level exams because they were not to appear in the class again until the national exam (next month), but that was not a celebration either, it was violence,” he said. Ngabonziza added that after the students finished their last exam, they went out of the classroom and began to throw stones in the air and over classrooms, breaking windows for more than five classrooms in the process. One student was also injured during the chaos, he said. After school authorities called for external help, Ngabonziza said, the police and other authorities arrived and gathered the students behind the “shameful act”, and advised them. They then invited their parents to school before disciplinary sanctions were taken. “The punishments we gave them include reparation of everything that was damaged, the second is that the students in question are not to stay at school any longer, instead they will go home and will only come back to school to sit national examinations,” he explained. Ngabonziza called on school authorities and teachers to always monitor the behavior of their students and lead them in the right direction.
