By Kim Tae-gyu
President Park Geun-hye pledged Friday to take steps to help protect children from bullying.
She also stressed the importance of the role of teachers in preventing school violence.
Park made the remarks after visiting Myungshin Elementary School in Seoul, four days after a high-school student killed himself, allegedly because of bullying.
"The government will spend more to beef up security facilities, including surveillance cameras, to prevent violence in schools," she said.
"On top of such measures, the most important thing is teachers' interest and affection for children … We need a fundamental change from the current education based on competition to one focusing on helping students build a decent character and creativity."
Park promised to come up with comprehensive measures to tackle the problem including increasing the number of teacher-counselors.
School violence is a "societal evil" Park promised to deal with during her presidential campaign last year, along with domestic violence and sexual assault.
The issue is now expected to further move up on her priority list because of the recent suicide.
On Monday, a high school freshman surnamed Choi killed himself by jumping from his apartment in Gyeongsan, North Gyeongsang Province, leaving a note claiming he suffered years of abuse from school bullies.
His suicide followed news that a 12-year-old girl in Busan jumped to her death on the first day of school due to worries about school life.
"Choi's suicide shocked Park and that's why she made the visit to a school, even though she has so many jobs to do in the initial stage of her administration," an aide to the President said.
"She instructed educational officials to find efficient ways of grappling with school violence, which has become worse of late."
A day after Choi's death, Park convened a contingency meeting to order the crafting of a set of countermeasures.
In a gathering of vice ministers, the government decided to replace old closed-circuit TV systems (CCTVs) currently installed in schools with high-definition systems to better monitor violence.
Presently, schools are equipped with more than 100,000 CCTVs across the nation but the definition is mostly only around 500,000 pixels, making it difficult to accurately monitor what is going on in and around the school.
The definition of the new CCTVs will be around 1 million pixels and their number will also rise so monitoring around the clock will be available.
The abuse of Choi apparently took place at blind spots CCTVs do not cover, as he wrote in his suicide note that the bullying happened in restrooms or classrooms without CCTVs.
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DAILY FORTUNE - SEPTEMBER 19, 2017 
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