Education is essential to the well being of any community, and nowhere is this more true than Bermuda where the Island's changing economy has made the demand for highly qualified and motivated Bermudians more pressing than ever before.

Because of that, it can be argued that teachers are an essential service in the same way that hospital staff or dockworkers are. While a withdrawal of service by teachers may not have the life and death urgency of a hospital or docks strike, it is nonetheless very damaging to the community.

Thus, it is difficult to sympathise with the CedarBridge teachers who staged a one-day sit-down on Friday which deprived students of a day's learning - and sent them out onto the streets, causing massive inconvenience for the pupils and parents alike.

But if it is not possible to be sympathetic towards the teachers, it is possible to understand their plight.

It must be assumed that this is not the first time they have raised the problems of discipline in the school and a union statement said on Friday that they felt their needs were not being handled properly.

Teachers have the right to feel safe in their own classrooms and schools. On Friday, they stated, correctly, that physical and verbal abuse towards teachers should not be tolerated. If teachers do not feel safe with their own students, then discipline at CedarBridge has reached a very sorry level. It is even more worrying that the teachers believe that up to 100 of the 900 students are "out of control".

That is something of a surprise as well. One of the greatest concerns about the "mega-schools" created under school restructuring was discipline and in the school's first year, those fears were borne out. But under the leadership of principal Kalmar Richards, the public perception was that discipline had improved.

The teachers' action on Friday suggests that that is not the case.

Unfortunately, there are any number of students in Bermuda schools whose behaviour, for various reasons, is beyond the norm.

But the hands of school administrators and teachers are very often tied when it comes to discipline and this needs to be changed. this is noit a call for corporal punishment; it is a call for schools to be able to deal qucikly and effectively with problem students, either through referral to special programmes like the Cadet scheme, suspension or expulsion.

What is certain is that learning cannot take place if there is no discipline in the classroom and the actions of the more than a few students at CedarBridge are preventing the students who do want to learn from doing so.

The good news is that a meeting held on Friday between all parties involved with the school seems to have produced some results. It is to be hoped that the remaining issues of concern will be resolved quickly so that CedarBridge teachers and students can get back to what they are supposed to be doing: teaching and learning.