Police officers responding to a report at the Siparia West Secondary School on Thursday found the aftermath of a fight, leaving five children with minor stab wounds.
TTUTA and the Santa Flora police are not in agreement about the possible trigger for this outbreak of violence.
TTUTA president Martin Lum Kin, who reported that desks and chairs were thrown during the altercation, feared gang influence in the attack.
The police were more inclined to consider inter-school rivalry.
But the known facts are worrying. One student from Palo Seco Secondary dressed in a Siparia West uniform and accompanied by colleagues, entered the school's compound, apparently armed and with a taste for blood.
It's hardly an isolated incident.
In too many government secondary schools, fights, both on and off school compounds, are almost a daily occurrence.
Soon after taking office in 2022, Mr Lum Kin called on the Government to strengthen the Student Services Division, which should be the first point of contact for children experiencing difficulty in public schools.
Principals in schools experiencing disruptions over the last two years have called for a police presence to "pat down" incidents.
But law enforcement intervention should be a last resort to manage incidents of indiscipline and unruly behaviour among students. The gap between a uniformed student and a uniformed officer is simply too vast for anything other than forceful suppression.
This is not a job for the police who are assigned to schools or to clusters of schools. These officers may not have had any specific training in handling children in a school environment, no matter how well-intentioned their interventions are.
In Scotland, incidents of school violence and aggression increased more than 53 per cent in the 2022-2023 school year compared to 2018-2019, the final school year before covid lockdowns.
No local studies have examined equivalent local socialisation gaps, but clearly anger management and conflict resolution should become a coaching priority in the public school system.
In 2022, the Education Ministry identified 16 schools as being high-risk, exhibiting one or all these negative indicators, most entering form one students scoring less than 30 per cent in the SEA, high levels of indiscipline and high absenteeism, or low levels of CSEC achievement.
Teachers and police cannot replace parents, but for the six to eight hours that children are under school supervision, a baseline of behaviours must be set and meaningfully enforced. Lamenting poor family support for students improves nothing if schools aren't equipped to address this shortfall.
Improving reasoning and social skills is necessary to defuse violence before it escalates, and TT faces the unwelcome possibility that what some students may leave public secondary schools with after five years is not academic certification but an aptitude for violent confrontation.
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