IF the alarm bells weren’t ringing before, they should be sounded really loudly now because the Education Ministry and the Police Force have more serious problems on their hands.

The hierarchy of the Police Force and the Guyana Defence Force have their work cut out trying to rope in rogue cops and soldiers in their ranks and in dealing with criminals and a slew of other matters.

But while truancy has always been an issue in schools around the world, it seems to have reached new levels in Guyana, adding to other problems, including rival gangs of students getting into pitched battles and boys carrying weapons to classes.

Now schoolgirls seem to be going wild here as they are in Jamaica where the popular song `Daddy’s Little Princess gone wild’ encapsulates the dilemma of girls getting into other activities when they should be in school.

A case in point here is the report earlier this week by the police that cops, acting on information, swooped on a house at Tuschen, East Bank Essequibo where they found four young girls, three of them attending a Community High School on the West Demerara, drinking alcoholic beverages with a man.

Police said another man there managed to escape when the cops arrived.

According to the report, police also found marijuana in the building and the man and the four juveniles were in custody as the investigations continued.

There have been cases before of boys caught drinking beers during school hours and sometimes after school, but instances of schoolgirls having a party in a house when they should be in classes have been rare.

Schoolgirls here have also been reported to be in the habit of getting into sexual encounters with mini-bus drivers and conductors and there have been shocking stories of the escapades of girls in buses in some Caribbean islands.

Daddy’s little princesses are going wild in the Caribbean and the

trend, it seems, has reached these shores.

Maybe it’s time for the sociologists here to link with the Education Ministry and other agencies – non-governmental and state – to try to find out what’s triggering this situation and to nip it in the bud before it escalates into a national problem.

Is it lack of parental supervision, peer pressure, men preying on young girls luring them into wild escapades?

Whatever maybe the reason or reasons, the problem has to be addressed

with some urgency.

Maybe there is need for counselling and a closer monitoring of children at school by the education authorities.

The implications of such behaviour by schoolgirls for the rest of society include the further spread of HIV-AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy which will place further strains on funds available for national development.

The government has been making huge allocations to education in the

national budget every year and those in charge of the education system, with the help of others, have to try to ensure that these funds are not wasted.