By Daa 'Iyah Muhammad Bermuda's youth are one of the strong driving forces in our community but the Island is seeing many of our teenagers growing up under a heavy cloud of negativity, it has been claimed.

"Very often young people do not receive the credit they deserve and there is often a negative association with youth,'' Melvyn Bassett, principal of the Middle School at Sandys pointed out during a recent graduation of students in a Police Outreach programme.

The Resistance Education and Community Help programme or REACH was established throughout Bermuda's middle school system to help educate and bring awareness to the Island's teenagers about the avoidance of negativity in their environments.

Altogether there are five active officers from each parish division that provide the middle school students with social and educational interaction on a regular basis.

Today, most teenagers are more aware about the negative aspects in life contrary to those teens 40 ago, according to Mr. Bassett. Bermuda is usually perceived as a non-gang related place, but all too often that is not true.

"The focus of the Police Outreach programme is teach students about drug education, crime, and how to deal with peer pressure and gangs,'' Sgt. Paul Singh told The Royal Gazette .

Sgt. Singh said the programme also teaches students how to become respectable individuals and take that back into the community.

Pupils were praised during the ceremony at the school for their hard work and for the successful completion from the Gang Resistance and Education Training (GREAT), an awareness course set up by the Police Outreach programme.

The teens participated in a nine-week curriculum course that taught them how to avoid gangs, be positive and use mutual respect in all situations.

The students provided the presentation with an atmosphere of electricity. They cheered, joked and laughed and even curtsied to show their appreciation of support from one another.

Numerous students were handed their certificates by Ch. Insp. Sinclair White of the Somerset Division and the pupils were told: "We would like to help you all stand as individual agents and will help you to resist the negativity''.

Ch. Insp. White and Sgt. Singh of the Somerset Division are active members in the West End area and were given a special thank you by the students. They were also lovingly described as men who never hesitated to be with the students upon request no matter what they were doing. And they were considered as members of the Middle School at Sandys family.

Co-ordinator and director of the programme, teacher Tonetta Spring was described as one of the driving forces behind the programme.

"I am very pleased at the attention the students pay to both the Chief Inspector and the Sergeant and I am very impressed that 95 percent of them were able to pass,'' Ms Spring said.

But Sgt. Singh pointed out: "Without Ms Spring there would have been no programme.'' Photos by Ras Mykkal Reach for the sky: Graduates of the Gang Resistance and Education Training Programme are pictured at the Middle School at Sandys with Ch. Insp. Sinclair White, Sgt. Paul Singh, and principal Melvyn Bassett.

They're great: Sgt. Paul Singh and Tonetta Spring, project co-ordinator of the REACH programme, stand together in community support.