All schools in Seoul will have at least one anti-violence counselor on staff by 2014 and teachers' paperwork will be reduced to enable them to spend more time with at-risk students, officials said Monday, revealing the latest measures to stamp out school violence.
The country has been grappling with unrelenting violence at elementary, middle and high schools, which has led to a series of suicides by bullied students.
Earlier Monday, two middle school students in Daegu were sentenced to three and three-and-a-half years, respectively, in prison for habitually bullying a classmate until he jumped to his death last year after blaming them in a suicide note.
Under the new measures, the number of counselors in Seoul's elementary and secondary schools will increase from the current 549 to 896 by the end of this year, which is expected to raise the rate of schools that have at least one counselor to 68 percent from 43 percent, according to the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education.
By 2014, every school in the city will have at least one teacher solely in charge of counseling students, it added.
The office also came up with measures to reduce teachers' workload to allow them to spend more time taking care of students vulnerable to acts of violence. The city office will reduce its required official documents for teachers by some 30 percent, while up to 80 percent of projects deemed unnecessary will be eliminated by 2014.
Meanwhile, the education ministry said earlier in the day that it will assign one extra teacher to each second-year class of the country's middle schools starting during the new semester in March. Middle school students in their second year have been identified as particularly vulnerable to violence at school.
The detailed plan, which came on the heels of the government's comprehensive measures announced earlier this month to stamp out school violence, will be implemented on a voluntary basis at the rest of middle school classes as well as elementary and high schools, the ministry added. (Yonhap)