Safety and Security Measures Adopted by Principals in Management of Public Secondary Schools in Imo State, Nigeria

The study investigated the safety and security measures adopted by principals in management of public secondary schools in Imo State, Nigeria. The study was guided by two research questions and two null hypotheses, tested at 0.05 level of significance. Descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study comprised 10,054 respondents (296 principals and 9,758 teachers) in public secondary schools in Imo State. The sample size of 481 respondents (30 principals and 451 teachers) was drawn for the study using proportionate sampling technique. Researcher-developed instrument titled “Safety and Security Measures of Principals for School Management Questionnaire (SSMPSMQ)†was used for data collection. The instrument has 20 items in two clusters, prepared along four points likert rating scales of Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree and Strongly Disagree with their corresponding points of 4, 3, 2, and 1 respectively. The instrument was duly validated by three specialists and using Cronback alpha method for test of internal consistency, reliability indices of 0.80 and 0.76 were obtained for cluster I and II respectively with an overall coefficient index of 0.78. Data obtained were analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions and t-test to test the hypotheses. The findings of the study revealed among others that safety and security measures were adopted by principals for staff and student management of public secondary schools in Imo State. Based on the findings, it was recommended, among others that Secondary Education Management Board (SEMB) should be contracting private security organization to promote safety and security of staff, students and facilities in secondary schools.