By K. NANCOO-RUSSELL

Freeport News Reporter

Students of Eight Mile Rock High are not expected to return to school until Tuesday after an infestation of insects and rodents forced the closure of that institution earlier this week.

According to the Ministry of Education's district superintendent responsible for high schools Hezekiah Dean, an assessment conducted by the Department of Environmental Health Services (DEHS) last week noted that several rooms within the school were unsafe to be occupied and suggested that the school be cleaned and exterminated.

Ministry officials then made the decision to close the school on Tuesday and employ a cleaning company to pressure clean and exterminate.

Once the company went in, what they found they realized that basically all of the rooms needed spraying.

"They extended the spraying to more areas than was anticipated and that was what has exacerbated the problem to this point where we are now where we had to change our arrangement," he said.

Pointing out that EMR is a very old physical structure, Dean said the problem with rodent infestation was a recurring one.

"There are rats, roaches and lots of other insects in various parts of the campus and an infestation of ants and the recurring problem of bats and pigeons," he said, adding that over the last two years, there has been a significant clean-up of that area for bats.

"The part of school that houses the science labs were always the main area of concentration for the bats and the pigeons."

The bats and pigeons get into the buildings through the vents, he explained.

"And of course once they get in, with bats there are hundreds and thousands of them from time to time and of course their continuous droppings lead to this acrimonious odour that over time gets unbearable," he said.

"The hospitality training lab, the situation in there is basically rats and roaches and so the company is doing the job of exterminating and sanitizing and cleaning in that lab and also we will have the repair men doing screens for the windows."

Dean said heavy metal screens will be installed in that lab instead of the regular screens, "so that they cannot be punctured anything trying to get inside like rats for instance."

Quite a bit of work was done to the school over the past three summers, the superintendent said, however, an extermination was never done.

"The school is old and work is ongoing. It's just that nothing has been done in the form of cleaning up by a pest control company. Repairs to windows, to plumbing and the rest of it we do, things like that but pest control wasn't done," he said.