Education Minister Chinnavorn Boonyakiat yesterday ordered the Bang Kapi Technology School to be closed for a week, following the murder of a nine-year-old schoolboy on a bus last Wednesday.
Meanwhile, a student who was suspected of stabbing rivals at MBK shopping mall last Saturday, surrendered to police yesterday.
In a bid to solve problems of student brawls, Education officials will soon meet with Army chiefs to discuss the possibility of sending at-risk students to a camp to do community work in the restive South.
After a meeting yesterday with 40 "at-risk" secondary schools, Bangkok deputy governors and parents' network representatives to discuss possible solutions to student brawls to be submitted to the Cabinet today, Chinnavorn said he had signed an order to close Bang Kapi Technology School for one week starting yesterday on grounds that its students repeatedly fought with others.
In regard to the Cabinet meeting today, he said he would explain measures the ministry had asked "at-risk" schools to undertake. He would also propose a proactive measures including having Obec sending at risk Mathayom and vocational college students to attend camps and do community service work in a challenging area that required youths to act with responsibility, such as the three southernmost provinces.
Chinnavorn said he instructed Office of Basic Education Commission (Obec) secretary general Chinnapat Phumrat to prepare a budget for and set details for such a plan.
He said he intended to send students to challenging areas because members of society felt it was a worthy suggestion - that "at risk" students should learn to take responsibility for their actions. He said he would discuss possible activities that students sent to camps in the far South could undertake with Army representatives.
In related news, Pathumwan Police yesterday morning took a 17-year-old student, who allegedly stabbed three Debsirin students at a bowling lane on the seventh floor at MBK mall last Saturday, to the Central Juvenile and Family Court after his parents brought him to police early yesterday.
The youth reportedly confessed to police that he ran into the victim's group and remembered one of them had beaten him up at Bonanza Mall on Friday. He went to "clear the air" but thought the rival students were pulling a weapon to attack him, so he took out a knife he carried and attacked them before fleeing home in a taxi.
One of three students he stabbed - 17-year-old Kanapat Theekhananthaporn - remained in a critical condition in a ICU room yesterday, whilst the two others were stable and had moved to a special patient room, the deputy director of Police General Hospital Colonel Supol Jongpanichkulthorn said.