The Police Civilian Oversight Authority (PCOA) is inviting younger creatives from establishments throughout the Jamaica Constabulary Power (JCF) Space 5 to showcase their expertise within the 2025 Remodeling Our Police Service (TOPS) Secondary Faculties Poster Competitors.
Launched in 2023, the initiative has rapidly develop into a signature characteristic of the TOPS Programme, providing college students a platform to artistically discover and categorical their views on police-citizen relationships.
This 12 months’s theme, ‘Imaging #AForce4Good: Partnerships for Progress’, invitations college students to replicate on the which means of partnership and discover how collaboration between residents and the police can contribute to constructing safer, stronger communities.
The competitors is now open to college students in Grades seven to 13 who’re enrolled in secondary colleges inside Space 5, which incorporates the Divisions of St. Catherine South, St. Catherine North, St. Thomas, and St. Andrew North. The total listing of eligible establishments is out there on the PCOA web site, www.pcoa.gov.jm.
Every faculty could submit as much as three entries, and college students are inspired to register and add their posters on-line through the web site. The submission deadline is Friday, October 17.
Winners will likely be introduced through the PCOA’s awards ceremony on Wednesday, November 26. Thrilling prizes, together with money awards, devices, goodie luggage, and reward baskets, await the top-three college students and their lecturers.
PCOA Chief Government Officer (CEO), Otarah Byfield Nugent, outlined particulars of the 2025 competitors and the concentrate on Police Space 5, throughout a current Jamaica Info Service (JIS) ‘Assume Tank’.
“Space 5 is just a little bit distinctive as a result of, though we’re taking a look at all the faculties in St. Catherine —roughly 23—[and] all the faculties in St. Thomas, [including] about six registered secondary colleges, not all colleges positioned in St. Andrew fall underneath the St. Andrew North Division,” she shared, noting that that Division consists of solely 9 eligible establishments.
Mrs. Byfield Nugent indicated that the poster competitors offers a strong platform for younger voices to be heard.
“We’re at all times used to adults being part of the dialogue and sharing their opinions about what citizen-policing relationships ought to seem like. But when we need to form the longer term, we should contain our college students. This competitors exhibits us that younger folks have a imaginative and prescient and a voice, and their views are essential in charting the way in which ahead,” she said.
Moreover, the CEO stated previous entries have revealed extraordinary creativity and perception.
The rewards notably lengthen properly past the awards ceremony. Successful posters are featured on PCOA calendars distributed to key stakeholders and are additionally tailored into early childhood colouring books—fostering constructive police-citizen relationships whereas supporting youngsters’s studying, creativity, and social growth.
Mrs. Byfield Nugent, in emphasising the long-term worth of the initiative, identified that “the scholars are capable of see their posters being displayed.”
“Aside from that, it offers only a constructive power and a constructive picture about citizen and police relationships. The colouring e book is a instrument that enables for college students to study colors, to study numbers, to develop their listening expertise and their effective motor expertise,” she said.
College students are additionally inspired to tune in to the PCOA’s ‘On the Nook’ podcast, which options interviews with final 12 months’s Space Two winners and runners-up sharing insights into their inventive course of, competitors expertise, and the inspiration behind their award-winning posters—providing worthwhile steering and encouragement to this 12 months’s cohort.
In the meantime, the Police Civilian Oversight Authority (PCOA) is encouraging colleges and college students throughout Police Space 5 to grab this chance to interact, categorical, and encourage by way of the 2025 Secondary Faculties Poster Competitors.
“We consider our younger individuals are prepared to steer the dialog about the way forward for policing and group relations. Via artwork, they’re serving to us in imaging partnerships for progress,” Mrs. Byfield Nugent emphasised.
For full competitors pointers, registration particulars, and the listing of eligible colleges, college students and lecturers are inspired to go to the Police Civilian Oversight Authority’s official web site at www.pcoa.gov.jm.
