Educators in Bermuda are "constantly bombarded" with inappropriate behaviour, a school therapist told MPs today.Shacolbi Basden told the joint select committee on violent crime and gun violence the behaviour included bad language, blatant disrespect, bullying, sexual gestures and complete lack of motivation."Children are coming to school unkempt, unfocused and unfamiliar with social and academic skills," she said. "Hence, educators are constantly multi-tasking i.e. teaching several levels of each objective."Ms Basden was one of three counsellors presenting to the committee today on behalf of Bermuda Union of Teachers.Former BUT president Lisa Trott spoke of the disparity between the educational attainment of boys and girls. She said male students were being required to learn in a way they were not biologically equipped to and then falling into a cycle of failure.Clindel Lowe, a counsellor at CedarBridge Academy, described how some boys take up crime to help their single mothers. "Some males see an illegal or dysfunctional way of making ends meet as the only way to make ends meet," she said.She offered five recommendations for change:* Have school resource officers from Bermuda Police Service in schools to ensure students build good relationships with police;* Have more after-school programmes;* Open a non-punitive residential facility for some students;* Put more resources into counselling; and* Bring gang experts into schools.Committee chairman Randy Horton spoke out against expelling students from schools, explaining that when members interviewed prisoners at Westgate they found that many had been expelled as youngsters.Earlier, Arnold Minors, former Premier Ewart Brown's press secretary, said spending large sums of money to tackle Bermuda's gang and gun problem was not necessarily the answer.Mr Minors told the joint select committee on crime this morning that getting large numbers of people to work together in a co-ordinated way would be more beneficial - and not necessarily costly.He said it could be a hundred people, or 200, or 500. He proposed that they be brought together in a one or two-day workshop to figure out what they could do to effect change."I believe that sustained action requires passion and commitment. The process that I'm talking about energises large numbers of people to move forward."Mr Minors, who lived overseas between 1964 and 2009, told how he worked to improve community safety in Toronto after a spate of gun violence among young black males.And he said he'd since been told his efforts saved the lives of at least three young men and helped countless others.Mr Minors said Bermuda had seen a shift in the last 45 years away from the notion that "everybody is responsible for everybody else"."The job of adults was to make sure that children grew up properly and anybody's child was everybody's child," he said. "Bermudians took care of themselves."