Students: We were unfairly terminated

WITH only two weeks before mid-year exams and practical teaching due, 11 suspended students from the Madang Teachers’ College are demanding justice.
The second-year students each received letters from the chairman, Moses Gabuogi, advising them of their immediate termination from the school.
The students claim a teacher, who had instigated a face-off between them and the teacher last week, was absent yesterday when they asked for an audience with the staff concerned. The incident that took place last Wednesday had led to their suspension.
The students claim the staff member is also a member of the college disciplinary committee.
The staffer smashed a laptop belonging to a student and physically assaulted him and other students because music was blaring loudly from the laptop.
According to one of the students, Enoch Steven, the staffer assaulted him without any good reason and even had him locked up at the Jomba cells without finding out the facts.
Steven said despite statements by security personnel on duty that morning, clearing him of any wrongdoing, he and his colleagues, among them two females, were suspended.
“I was asked to provide information as a witness by the disciplinary committee but to my surprise when I went in, the staff member advised the committee on a totally different matter from the incident and recommended that I be terminated,” Steven said.
It is understood that the school principal, Stephen Potek, left for Port Moresby over the weekend.
Meanwhile, the letter from Gabuogi was not on a school letterhead but it ordered the students to immediately vacate the school dormitories.